The Innovation Prize for Africa (IPA) hosted its first ever Twitter chat on Wednesday, 23 September 2015, entitled: Why Innovation Competitions are Important in Africa. The Twitter chat featured IPA Director, Pauline Mujawamariya (@PaulineM4), CEO of The Innovation Hub in South Africa, Mclean Sibanda (@mcleansibanda) and IPA 2015 prize winner, Alex Muriu (@hellomuriu).
IPA calls itself “a landmark program of the African Innovation Foundation whose purpose is to increase the prosperity of Africans through catalysing the innovation spirit in Africa.”
Of course you can read through all the tweets but here I would like to highlight some of them, which I find most interesting:
We have 2 prizes launching this month – @CIPrize in Kenya and Clean City Challenge Ghana | http://bit.ly/1NMceFG | #IPA2016
So there are more prizes, not “only” the IPA.
@Sayovo34#IPA2016 pay Attention to the future of the Innovators; we like to know if our prize will move the Innovator Forward or not
The IPA is trying to identify the best ways of supporting innovators.
@hellomuriu What’s early stage in #Africa ? 2 months 2 years? @IPAprize#IPA2016
Good question!
@IPAprize over and above prize money however, the key is follow up. Most competitions end with the award ceremony #IPA2016
An important lesson!
Prizes shouldn’t be necessarily financial. Can be #Technical Assistance from Institutions like @TheFoundersHive#IPA2016@klabrw
These are just a few quotes. A vast majority of the tweets covered the necessity to offer follow-up support to innovators after the award ceremony. This seems to be a key factor to successful innovation. Is that true only for Africa or for start-ups in general?
