Kenyan tech needs multiple options and flexible rules
What you need to know:
- You might not be too impressed until you realise that the same report ranks Kenya at position four in Sub-Saharan Africa – only behind Mauritius, Seychelles and South Africa.
- Kenyan innovations need to be attracting a significant amount of venture capital.
- Being lax on intellectual rights may prevent investors from participating while being too restrictive may block innovation
Erik Brynjolfsson , a Professor at MIT, defines innovation as a process of continuous experimentation, combination and recombination.
He argues that innovation can occur around processes (new traffic flows in Nairobi), products (new mobile handset) or applications (new mobile banking or money transfer applications).
In a previous blog, we discussed innovation within the Kenyan space, particularly revolving around mobile applications. Much earlier on, we had discussed the lack of institutional frameworks that are necessary to create a sustainable innovation ecosystem. The thrust of that discussion was the need to have academia, industry and government working together to deliver sustainable innovation.
We seem to have checked the correct milestones in as far as the institutional framework for innovation is concerned. The Science, Technology and Innovation Act (2013) was passed and our National Commission on Science, Technology & Innovation NACOSTI was established.
That we seem to be on the right track is supported by the latest 2014 Global Innovation Ranking report, which placed Kenya at position 85 out of 143 economies.
You might not be too impressed until you realise that the same report ranks Kenya at position 4 in Sub-Saharan Africa – only behind Mauritius, Seychelles and South Africa.
We can cut ourselves some slack and stop being too harsh by always complaining about what is not working, while totally neglecting to acknowledge and celebrating what is working.
LUCRATIVE INNOVATION
Many Kenyan innovation hubs such as iHub, iLab, C4DLab, NaiLAB just to mention a few have been more widely celebrated abroad than locally. Several innovations, particularly revolving around the MPESA phenomena have emerged from these innovation hubs.
M-Kopa for example, helps low-income consumers acquire solar powered energy solutions at affordable rates.
The agricultural insurance product Kilimo Salama, World Vision’s mHealth platform now rebranded as Jamii Smart, educational service Eneza Education and dairy farming support I-cow all follow the same business model – supporting users whose micro-payment model MPESA has enabled to great success.
Other developments like Ma3Route, NikoHapa and many others aim to crowd-source user-generated information and then share it out to the wider public.
We are on the correct lane for innovation, but clearly we can do better. There seems to be a gap between innovative start-ups on one hand and wealth creation on the scale commonly demonstrated by US or Korea- based innovations on the other.
Most of our local innovations do not seem to be able to scale up to national, let alone international levels. Kenyan innovation need to be attracting significant amount of venture capital.
The recent acquisition of Weza Tele shows what could be if local and international investors were to put serious money into Kenyan start-ups.
INDIA'S GENERIC DRUGS
Barriers to unlocking the full potential of start-ups include monopolistic tendencies which make business difficult for emerging innovators.
So, for example, a tech start-up which has created a new app and does not want to be tightly bound to a dominantplatform may lack options for deploying it.
Another possible barrier is copyright and patent frameworks that are either too lax or too restrictive. The best example is the development of pharmaceutical drugs where intellectual property rights are paramount for attracting research investments.
Drugs for epidemics like HIV/Aids are often developed in the US at high cost, but when this knowledge is too tightly protected, it ends up restricting further innovation around HIV/Aids drugs, unless exploited in other jurisdictions with fewer restrictions.
India with its generic drug industry comes to mind, as well as China, for its reverse-engineered manufacturing and technology products.
Being lax on intellectual rights may prevent investors from participating, while being too restrictive may block innovation, which must arise from the existing knowledge base.
We must strike a delicate balance that facilitates innovation while enabling investors to make reasonable returns if and when they chose to put their money in our start-ups.
The answers are not easy to find, but we hope the upcoming Innovation Week will shed some light.
Mr Walubengo is a lecturer at the Multimedia University of Kenya, Faculty of Computing and IT. Twitter:@jwalu email: [email protected]
