On October 12 and 13, 2023, tech experts, policymakers, entrepreneurs, corporate leaders, investors, and legal experts from more than 25 countries will converge at the Science Museum in Addis Ababa, the capital of Africa.
Their common objective: collaborate on ventures transforming Ethiopia, and Africa at large during the Enkopa Summit. The Summit has an objective to redefine Entrepreneurship and Innovation in a country that badly needs a pivot in its Economic Growth.
The organizers of the event believe that “we can no longer expect Ethiopia to grow organically and that we need an Ethiopia 2.0 commensurate with population growth, the demand of the youth, and external economic pressures”. They believe the Enkopa Summit will play a crucial role in bringing decision-makers from all concerned stakeholders around a table to have purpose-driven conversations.
Most large companies, public enterprises and multinationals present in Ethiopia are not getting involved in the whole Entrepreneurship and Innovation ecosystem. Indeed, most if not all incubation, acceleration and investment activities in the ecosystem are currently being driven by development partners and the public sector.
What makes Enkopa Summit different is that it is first and foremost a private sector-led initiative. Secondly, the Summit will bring large corporations to the table to discuss topics such as mergers and acquisitions, Antitrust Laws, Corporate Restructuring, and many more corporate-oriented topics. This, of course on top of entrepreneurship-oriented topics.
Why this approach to the Summit? The organizers explain it by mentioning the unhealthy relationship between tech vendors and large companies in Ethiopia.
Large companies are usually suspicious of local innovators and rather choose to contract foreign-based contractors, spending hard currency on a land far away from Ethiopia instead of spending local currency on local innovators.
When large companies do choose to contract with local innovators, they treat them as order takers rather than partners.
The other path they sometimes choose is to build solutions themselves, rather than focus on their core competencies.
The outcome with all three options remains the same: the local Entrepreneurship and Innovation Ecosystem does not grow; at best it plateau.
Introducing corporate-oriented topics can help large corporations mature their processes and fix their relationships with external vendors.
The inevitable consolation of the banking sector will accelerate these partnerships, but all parties need to be ready. Management consulting firms also need to be on standby to lead highly complex Post Merger Integration (PMI) programs.
In general, the Enkopa Summit will attempt to disrupt the current perception of Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Ethiopia. Unfortunately, Entrepreneurship and Innovation have been perceived as a hobby pursued by campus dropouts who are barely making ends meet. Most large companies, public enterprises, and multinationals present in Ethiopia have innovative solutions for solving internal problems, including through intrapreneurship programs.
By exhibiting these innovative solutions at the Summit, they can start a conversation with entrepreneurs and innovators. Those entrepreneurs and innovators may localize and improve those solutions. Through these partnerships, an entrepreneur or innovator can scale, attract investment, grow, and perhaps become a unicorn.
