Innovation Ecosystems in Africa

Book excerpt: Innovation Ecosystems in Africa aims to deepen and broaden the visibility and interrogation of African innovation systems in practice by offering unique analysis of the emergence, growth and future prospects of endogenous innovation practices and lessons across the continent. The stories depict systemic innovations in a range of critical development areas from health and education to leadership and entrepreneurialism, and span from North to South, and East to West, covering more than a dozen different African cities and countries. In addition to sharing knowledge about exciting but rarely acknowledged cases of innovation in Africa, the book serves also as a work to inform policymakers and practitioners throughout Africa on how to learn from experiences towards developing more enabling innovation ecosystems to nurture creativity and solve the problems that we have. This book provides policymakers, business and opinion leaders both inspiration and useful policy takeaways that can guide strategies and support concrete measures to foster and speed up the pace of developmentally impactful innovation on the continent. Innovation Ecosystems in Africa builds upon the work of the African Innovation Summit (AIS), by further examining how the innovation systems environments in Africa function (or not) to address the most basic conditions of socio-economic and institutional development required on the continent. In this volume, learning case studies identified alongside the second Africa Innovation Summit (Kigali, June 2018) examine various sectoral exemplars and transversal dimensions to help inform insights about how policymakers and practitioners might develop more effective and impactful innovation-driven strategies, ecosystems and enterprises. This edited collection uses multi-country, cross-sectoral case studies to advance an empirically grounded, appreciative investigation of how innovation is being used to address fundamental development challenges on the continent, and how the African innovation ecosystems could be made more enabling into the future.