Building A Thriving Innovation Economy
Our First Decade -Continental Influence and key learnings 2011 - 2021
Exciting beginnings
There was an air of excitement and uncertainty in the late 2000’s when Africa began to see the rise of independent innovation hubs. The African continent had begun to truly embrace digitalisation for efficiency and economic growth and with this came the beginning of democratisation of innovation. More Africans were venturing to innovate at scale outside of government agencies, universities and corporates. The concept of independent innovation hubs was relatively new in the African context and the few spaces that had succeeded in launching and beginning to grow communities naturally gravitated towards each other. Early innovation hub founders will tell stories of finding each other, working to define for themselves this concept of innovation communities, understanding the local context and perhaps being overwhelmed by the opportunity that growth of the hubs presented. While there was still a lot of learning to do, what became apparent quickly was
the need to share experience and collaboratively design innovation communities across Africa.
AfriLabs was founded to give innovation hubs an efficient avenue to share what worked and what didn’t work in innovation communities across Africa, to document the journeys of innovation hubs and to get smarter faster with regard to understanding and supporting local ecosystems.
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