KIAMBATI: Innovation is a long-term plan

Stimulating and supporting innovation among the youth offers great opportunities for businesses.

The main aim of every business is to defy markets and be able to make profits through management of supply and demand. This explains why every business focus should be mobilisation of capital and innovation. Innovation is considered more important and valuable because it raises productivity and, therefore, it is normal to see businesses skewed towards using technology to improve processes while others develop entirely new product categories and disrupt the traditional way of conducting business in various industries as they seek to create value.

To stimulate young people in Kenya to be innovative in and outside their formal learning environment, we must be clear about elements of innovation. There must be vision-driven innovation that reflects future success and prioritised strategic objectives. Since this does not happen in a vacuum, risk and risk management are inevitable.

There should be a conversation on risk tolerance relative to potential rewards commensurate with the ambition and potential of the innovations in question. Individual and institutional capabilities are so central and cannot be ignored.

Capability should be treated as ongoing strategic priority making it clear who should be on the executive team, talent strategy and support technology architecture. Once these critical elements are clear, resources should be deployed coupled with useful framework for expenditure and decision making across the innovation space. Communication to all stakeholders is very crucial because innovation governance must be well understood especially the vision and risk tolerance given the nature of innovation is to continuously take risks and broad transparency initiatives.

There is need to also consider the innovation eco system because it stimulates and facilitates the creation and execution of innovation processes. It does this by building and spreading knowledge of the system actors, their capacities and rules of engagement and by stimulating interaction. An innovation eco system is inclusive and people are a part of it by their own choice and by engaging. Clearly, viability of the entire innovation ecosystem is critical for success and therefore the broader societal environment as a context for the ecosystem poses a new challenge in terms of ecosystem management. If we are to stimulate young people to be more innovate, we should develop a unique framework capable of connecting and synthesising the innovation ecosystem and strategic niche management in a multilevel way and with clear guiding principles.

In conclusion, innovation is not a one day or season event sealed inside a boardroom, but a process of discovery, re-engineering and transformation requiring meticulous connection of the entire ecosystem, collaboration, relationship management and inclusivity.

The innovation process changes the vision and the opportunity as we learn more and more about the desired change.

To young people out there, you do not need to be geniuses to innovate, all you need is to carefully interrogate small and large problems so as to provide solutions that make change and create value.

Dr Kiambati is a social scientist and management consultant at Karatina University.