Monday 15 July 2013

Driving Innovation.COM – Brief Insights from #IWeek13




‘Innovation: is the application of new solutions that meet new requirements, inarticulate needs or existing market needs. – Wikipedia'

Hosted and organized by the prestigious ‘Knowledge Entrepreneurs’, the 2013 version of the annual Innovation week was at the Advanced InformationTechnology Institute (AITI) in Accra under the theme Driving Innovation: New communities, New Opportunities, New Markets (Driving Innovation.COM).

The five day programme was lined up with morning workshops, innovators waves, keynotes, panel sessions, speed mentoring sessions, QnA sessions amidst exhibitions, demonstrations and networking.

 speed  mentoring session
Participants filling up auditorium

Since IWeek13 was an ECOWAS edition, the event was streamed live and there were participants of different nationalities including 150 university students from Nigeria in physical attendance as well. Many startup founders, entrepreneurs, students, government agency representatives and educators from various levels also filled the auditorium to capacity throughout the afternoon sessions.

The hands-on ideation session with strategist Andrews Missingham saw participants on the first day thinking about feature phones and teenage girls in ‘designing for real people’ . 

Running alongside the main event was an Enterprise Linux workshop with Mr. Ernest Ofori.

The Chairman of the National Development Planning Commission, Mr. P.V. Obeng stated in his keynote that countries like Korea had transformed their economies using innovative technologies. He advised that the country needed to up intellectual capacities to match certificates since there was already available infrastructure. 

The plenary session which was chaired by Hon. Victoria Hammah saw panelists like Derrydean Dadzie of DreamOval and Kinna Likimani of BloggingGhana stress the need for use of local talent and resources when looking for solutions to problems. It was summed up by Andrews Missingham in his keynote when he said that culture must be worked with not against when dealing with mobiles in Africa since Africa was mobile.

The second business day was when discussions on 'E-money meets Real money' were held. Apart from Derek Appiah of Logiciel Ghana’s session on business ecosystems, CEO’s of financial institutions including Fidelity Bank spent the afternoon with 25 startups mentoring and discussing possible opportunities for innovation and funding.

There was also Mr. Philip Sowah of Airtel Ghana who gave participants understanding into the current mobile money system in the country.


There is a long term ICT4AD policy that was drafted in 2003 to improve the quality of life using ICT for economic and social development as mentioned by Mawuena Trebarh of the Ghana Investment Promotion Centre. Her session gave participants the opportunity to know about who is investing and how we can get more investments especially in ICT. She further revealed that there is location incentives (tax rebate) for manufacturing industries located in regional capitals. 
This was after CEO of PopOut, Mr. Ametorgoh Maximus took participants through ‘taking innovative ideas to the market’ and an earlier interactive ‘Emotional Intelligence’ workshop by Effie Ansah.

Joe Mensah (IBM) and Regina Agyare (SoronkoSolutions) joined in a panel that discussed the opportunities in the ICT sector in Ghana


The Enterprise Linux workshop was in its fourth and final day with Ernest Ofori on Iweek13 Day 3.

 It was evident on Day 4 of a well sponsored Innovation Week 2013 that government processes need technology to make things easier and convenient. Lots of interaction went on among developers and tech community as the NCCE, NHIA, GCNet, CRS all presented what goes into their work and the challenges they are faced with. It was to find if there were any innovative ways problems such as creating different biometric databases for agencies such as NHIA, SSNIT, EC could be tackled with the feature phone (common in Ghana) in mind. The Catholic Relief Services also explained the ICT4D Innovation Challenge to participants.




Whilst ‘Installfest FOSSFA’’ was going on the final day of #Iweek13, BloggingGhana was leading a session discussing ‘innovations’ and ‘inventions’. Participants discussed innovative social media campaigns that caught their attention and how they could get government to get interactive using the available platforms since about 15% of Ghana's population was online. After a lot of interaction, participants advised that BloggingGhana formed clubs in the Senior High Schools to assist in the general distribution of social media to effectively benchmark government and its agencies.


There were briefings on Creative Commons and Worldreader’s LibraryBox before Bernard Avle moderated a panel session on ‘Privacy, Open Government and Open Data’. Discussion revolved around the Freedom of Information Bill. In the open data model, there is technology, policy and demand all involved in defining what should be regulated or not. Dorothy Gordon (DG at AITI-KACE) , Nehemiah Attigah, Ernest Ofori and Sabrah Mensah were on the panel.





Participants were encouraged to get innovative and try to find solutions to problems that we are faced as a country in areas of health, agriculture, education etc. using new and available technologies as tools so our economic fortunes are turned around. 

 More tweets from the event can be found here.




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1 comment:

  1. Ato16 July 2013 at 23:34

    Given that I couldn't attend, this is a great way to capture what happened at #iweek13. Thanks Elorm.

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