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Kudzai M Mubaiwa Business Hub
Competitions are an important part of the innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem. They are platforms that showcase the best ideas (hopefully) and stimulate both the project owners and other aspiring innovators or entrepreneurs. As a repeat judge for some of these events, I am motivated whenever I see high school and tertiary level students as well as other youth present and pitch their start-up/business ideas in public.

The confidence, the enthusiasm, the pleasant feeling when you hear strong business cases and viable models coupled with some disappointing, almost scandalous ones is all quite an exciting experience.

Current situation: Local and regional competitions

In tech spaces I got the opportunity to host health and education hackathons – which are in the simplest definition, competitions for building tech solutions under a specific theme.

These were great platforms to jumpstart ideas, learn new things, meet possible co-founders and make lasting contacts.

Start-up Weekend is a popular hackathon type event typically spread over a few days. A local tech blog TechZim hosts an annual Start-up challenge sponsored by Zol.

There I have had occasion to see some brilliant stuff – as well as hear some being told off and challenged on their suggestions that they will “beat Google with their revolutionary new search engine”.

In the social entrepreneurship space, where the bottom line is not just profit but change; the pilot phase of the Social Enterprise Bootcamp run by Irene Chikumbo has just concluded with exit pitches.

This October, the University of Zimbabwe chapter of Enactus will send a team to Johannesburg to compete at the Enactus World Cup finals, yet another social entrepreneurship competition.

I am also aware of start-up and business plan competitions that were sponsored by CBZ Bank (Entrepreneurs Suite, facilitated by Boost Fellowship) as well as POSB (High School Start-up Competition, facilitated by Investor Saint P/L).

The Innovation Baraza started with a bang this July, attracting thousands of attendees with the selected innovations pitching their ideas for an acceleration program prize.

At a regional level, we are aware of Demo Africa, a launch platform for ideas that can scale easily.

They were in Harare for their roadshow and picked one start-up Road Rules to participate via direct entry and from the call conclusion, another Zimbabwean team IPCe Productivity were selected.

Both teams will compete with other African Innovations in September. A few weeks back, we had the director for the Innovation Prize Africa coming to Zimbabwe to advertise the recently launched 2015 edition of the Innovation Prize Africa.

Winners of this one will benefit from $150 000 set aside to promote African solutions to African challenges.

At a fireside chat at local co-working space Area46 that I attended she highlighted the focus sectors for 2015 as manufacturing and service industry, health and well-being, agriculture and agribusiness, environment, energy and water and ICTs.

It was interesting to note that the majority of attendees were active in the ICTs space and many of them were hearing about the IPA for the first time!

It is quite encouraging though when so much resource is set aside to promote local and regional innovation and entrepreneurship, especially under the current theme: Made in Africa.

Benefits and limitations of competitions

The value of competitions to start-ups is varied. For some they are a platform to launch a new product, innovation, or company model and get people to know and start talking about it, test reactions of a panel of judges and receive feedback and of course get capital in some form – through contacts, actual cash, incubation services, increased exposure and new markets.

The very idea of winning is attraction all by itself as it feels like a validation that one is doing the right thing or at least moving in the right direction!

That vote of confidence does wonders in increasing confidence, pumping adrenalin and driving the teams to keep pushing and perhaps make bold business decisions for growth.

The downside is, for many teams, winning competitions can become an end in itself, or; the team becomes obsessed with pursuing every next competition (and of course posting the relevant selfies on the go), at the expense of building the product or executing the idea.

A year later, you may still hear rhetoric prefixed with words like “we intend to” or “when we have completed it, it will . . .” and not see a functional prototype at all.

We have a lot of work in getting our winners to all leverage on the traction that is sparked by winning competitions to implement their good ideas.

Ecosystem/Innovation Spaces also benefit from competitions, they tend to be hosts of these and they are often done as a service to the entrepreneurship and innovation community – as a gathering point and a platform for collaboration and learning.

Competitions help build a pipeline so that spaces can select if they so will the best projects they can work with – depending on their mission.

In addition, competitions tend to be a barometer of the quality of projects in an ecosystem and reflect much on how the spaces are grooming local entrepreneur and innovators.

The downside is that they cannot have too many of these as putting together one is a major commitment and often a thankless endeavour.

Other limitations arise when the participants are recycled at all competitions and there is not much of a choice due to mediocrity.

Mobilising in areas outside Harare is very difficult as most do not have a footprint, never mind a single consistent person outside the capital to push any agenda.

Regional competitions tend to face a similar dilemma where African competitions are skewed in favour of Nigerian and South African participants probably because greater outreach effort was made in those countries or very simply due to the fact that they have huge populations compared to most countries.

Kudos to competitions such as IPA and Demo Africa that deliberately run road shows and deploy resources to raise awareness, albeit again, only in the capital cities.

Practical implementation

nationwide

The contribution and value of start-up competitions is clear, and the mandate is to replicate them is as many places – build them in from the district, ward, provinces level – areas government already has the governing structures in place.

Perhaps, partnerships among the ministries of ICT, SME’s, Technology, Youth, Women – an inter ministry initiative – and leverage of local companies as sponsors, at each level.

It would be awesome to participate at the Maraire Store (Mutambara) District start-up competition and win a grant of $250 to formalise alongside $100 sponsorship in travel and subsistence to compete at the Provincial competition.

The important thing is to use competitions to stimulate movement from ideas to implementation and ensure they do not become an end in themselves.

Sowing into innovation does not require millions of dollars at all and the domino effect will be a couple more from the area aspiring to be like that local champion and starting to work on their own enterprise for the next round.

The community itself will have that person as a rallying point and a source of pride (think the Hunger Games here, lol), and he/she can bring back lessons from the next stage to contribute in local economic development.

Indeed the best solutions are local solutions and the best innovations are found at the fringes.

Who knows, somewhere in Chakohwa a young lady may be sitting on an innovation that could help a city!

A competition may just be the break she needs to showcase her brilliance and move forward!

◆ Kudzai M Mubaiwa is an economic development professional and managing consultant of InvestorSaint Pvt Ltd, a financial education company. She is also a certified incubator manager and cofounder of iZone. She can be reached via email on [email protected] or twitter handle @kumub