Posts by Nicolas Friederici

During the interviews I conducted in Zimbabwe last October, many participants asked me: “Why pick Harare as a case study? Why not Nairobi or Lagos?” Indeed, Harare’s “ecosystem” is nascent, and the few tech startups that exist are hampered by fundamental market and skill constraints, as discussed in my last post. At the same time,… Read More: Harare’s Hubs: Excitement, Experimentation, and Many Open Questions »

Click here to view this post as it originally appeared on VC4Africa.   We all know that early monetization and revenue generation are crucial for digital startups in Africa. Entrepreneurs in pretty much any African city find it impossible to obtain significant scaling capital before they show revenue, as angel investors (if they exist at… Read More: Let’s Work Together: Mobile Operators and Digital Startups in Africa »

Tech entrepreneurship is definitely on the rise in Sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, actually, this rise is not evenly distributed across Africa’s vast geography. Leaving aside South Africa, we can observe that the emergence of content and application startup activity has so far concentrated in the sprawling capital cities of two countries with growing economies, large populations,… Read More: Harare’s Fledgling Tech Entrepreneurs »

“Ecosystem” has become one of the most common terms in tech innovation. It rolls easily off the tongue, probably because it has a communal connotation, and evokes ideas such as “collaboration” and “multi-stakeholder.” Where “innovation system” sounds like a technocratic term that emphasizes institutions and deemphasizes people’s agency at the grassroots, “ecosystem” sounds like a… Read More: Kigali’s Evolving Tech Innovation… Ecosystem »

If you go to Rwanda and you’re interested in ICT and tech, chances are, you will soon pass through kLab, Kigali’s tech innovation hub. And so it was for me two months ago, when I started data collection for my research on innovation networks in Sub-Saharan Africa. I had a clear strategy: Through interviews, I… Read More: A Tech Innovation Hub in the Making: kLab and Its… »

Also refer to related posts in the Stanford Social Innovation Review and innovationmanagement.se where colleagues and I expanded on some elements outlined in this post.   Innovation and entrepreneurship “hubs” and “labs” are all the rage these days. A wide range of actors is convinced that hubs represent a genuinely new and exciting model for… Read More: What is a tech innovation hub anyway? »