Stirring up Kenyan ICT start-ups

Ideas are the currency of the IT sector and therefore I am going to propose one from my Current visit with Oracle Open World and Facebook during this stint of 2 weeks that I have been in the US.

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First an update.

There will be two inward trade missions to Kenya in the next month.

The ICT Board will be hosting a delegation of potential IT investors to Kenya in last week of October. They will be coming to look for partners and potential small ICT partners. They are interested in upstart companies in online marketing, web and mobile applications. More from the website www.ict.go.ke

The ICT Board will be hosting an inward delegation from Ireland which comprises technology firms from the digital hub. www.digitalhub.com. They will be looking to partner small upstart companies and understand outsourcing opportunities.

On my facebook page lately, I have been hinting at the approach of intellectually driven IT firms as a way to create new businessness in Kenya. The great thing about intellect is that it is rarely dependent on social circumstance. In fact some of the challenges we face in Kenya provide the fodder for great innovation. IT runs very few businesses, ver few businesses are networked, most small traders cannot scale because scaling requires systems. I am scared of carrying cash home and there comes MPESA to help me.

A few months ago on kictanet, one of the contributors was very critical of the approach where we learn from what works elsewhere and adapt. He seemed to feel we should be more practical and just get on with it.

Kenyan entrepreneurs are doing both. having been an entrepreneur myself, I am coming to terms with the level of exposure and knowledge that one requires in order to fully grasp the possibilities.

Todays business start-ups are luckier I would argue than we were even 10 years ago. You have a potenial global audience for ideas that have real traction. Facebook has 300 million users and grows 1.5 million users every day. You dont need a radio or TV license and any countless connections to set up a truly powerful media platform.

But this opportunities have also meant that business thinkers have to work harder to ensure their ideas are baked better. The world stage is more critical.

I have talked many of the entrepreuners in technology in Kenya. Many of us, myself included have been through a big struggle with ideas, business management, start-up financing and operational financing. Many of us have struggled to keep good people working for us for long enough to make a good return, many have struggled to make good talent motivated enough to work.

We may not have come to terms with the fact that these business we run are purely intellectual and therefore the key resource is really talented individuals with a certain way of thinking.

Sometimes when you put too many talented people in one company, it also does not work as well, because everyone over-ideates and few actually get the real business done.

What struck me, listening to Larry Ellison (Oracle CEO) speak live at the Open World last week was that even for the most established, most successful technology firms, innovation was at the core. Oracle has been a leader in process management and cost optimization to the extent that their cost savings gave them the cash that they then used to acquire companies that add value.

Perhaps we need our more established business owners who are looking to grow across east and central Africa to buy smaller companies in order to obtain good intellectual property.

I willbe speaking to the SME ICT companies in October and November about creating more Oracle, Cisco, EMC, Microsoft etc partners as a way to develop capacity for themselves. There is alot to gain from these larger ‘global platform’ providers.