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This year in Nairobi Kenya, GrowVC will join over 150 regional innovators, policymakers, thought leaders and other stakeholders from over 25 countries around the world at the Open Innovation Africa Summit. The primary focus being how to further enhance the African entrepreneurial ecosystem.

As part of the pre-summit preparations, there is the Open Innovation Africa Ideas Challenge (OIAS2 from Ideas to Innovation), a competition open to all technologists, application enthusiasts, developers, students, entrepreneurs, influencers and experts. Those attending are encouraged to promote the creation of new mobile innovation services and collaborative models for Africa. The crowdsourcing platform http://www.ideasproject.com, will accomplish this by allowing anyone who is interested to submit their ideas. The top 3 ideas submitted will win a trip to present their respective ideas at the Open Innovation Summit in Nairobi on May 29-30, 2012. This Africa initiative will be evaluated by the sponsors; Nokia, Capgemini and infoDev at the World Bank using the following criteria:

• Impact: societal, business, innovation
• Scalability: how this tool or practice can be ported to different scales and contexts
• Novelty: whether the idea is social or technological it should present fresh thinking and creative problem solving

The overall theme for the summit will be Leadership for innovation. The agenda will be built around the following four areas of interest:

• Technology/Innovation Financing
• The Mobile Information Society
• eTransformation
• The Ecosystem for Innovation

The pace of African mobile growth and penetration is alarming. While the mobile market penetration in Africa will reach 60% among Africa’s one billion people in 2012, it is already at 100% in some African countries. The Open Innovation Africa Summit will seek to continue stimulating the innovation debate on how to harness, leverage and nurture the great opportunities that lie ahead for Africa.

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Tags: africa, Entrepreneurship

This entry was posted on Friday, April 27th, 2012 at 2:30 pm and is filed under Business Updates, Entrepreneur Inspiration, Entrepreneur Motivation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.