Looking back at 2020, one of the best decisions I made was applying to be part of the Innovate For Africa community. Innovate For Africa, IFA for short, is a program that inspires and trains aspiring African entrepreneurs and then provides them the opportunity to work at a startup with continuous support. IFA aims to create the next generation of African innovators while supporting existing innovators, thereby strengthening the whole innovation ecosystem. The application process was quite rigorous. After going through rounds of interviews I finally got an acceptance letter into the program, words cannot explain how excited I was about the news. That's how I started the new year as an IFA fellow. During the four weeks of the Innovation Readiness Training I learned to demonstrate innovation, collaboration, grit, growth mindset an inclusivity and diversity.
I had a mix of feelings as I joined my first class on Monday January 4, 2021. I was excited and at the same time uncertain about what to expect from the training. In a while we introduced ourselves and met our remarkable facilitators.
Afterwards, we did a short activity to learn the importance of group culture. There I learned my first lesson on collaboration- set a strategy before brainstorming ideas, everyone’s voice must be heard. Looking through the curriculum, I could see that the training was going to be fast-paced. There was going to be lessons on Personal Branding, Design Thinking, Strategic Analysis and Hard Skills Lab. I will talk a bit about these curricula in the following sections.
Design Thinking
Design thinking is a human-centered approach to creating innovative business solutions and can be divided into 5 stages: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. Before I joined IFA, I knew a bit about design thinking but I did not know how practical it was for creating innovative solutions. By working on a three-week long hackathon I was able to realize how important this process for innovators. During the hackathon I worked on a project where I applied the design thinking process to create a valuable solution called FarmSmart. You can read in detail about it here.
Personal Branding
The personal branding curriculum was a significant part of my training. For me it was a process of self-discovery. I had to dig deep to find answers to questions like: Who am I? What motivates me? What are my skills? I crafted my career objective and included the skills I can offer an organization. I was helped to refine my resume and fit it into a single page, create a portfolio and a blog in order to share my thoughts with you.
Hard Skill Lab
As a software developer, I have always expressed interest in creating valuable products for users, this led me to select the product management track in the hard skills lab. I had the opportunity to apply my skills as a product manager on a real-life project called Duma. I conducted user interviews, set out a vision for the product, created the product roadmap and timeline and created prototypes. I also got to meet a wonderful mentor, Ajoke Salaudeen who readily guided me through my project and provided constructive feedback regarding my work.
Key Takeaways
The innovation readiness training has helped me improve in many areas. I am proud of my ability to collaborate and communicate effectively in a team. The hard skills lab especially