‘Pitch better have my money’ by Francis Stevens George

Freetown Pitch Night has become Sierra Leone’s most successful gathering of entrepreneurs. Its organiser, Francis Stevens George, MD GEN SL & CEO Innovations SL & Innovations Axis talks about his vision of a vibrant and effective entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Freetown Pitch Night has become Sierra Leone’s most successful gathering of entrepreneurs.  Its organiser, Francis Stevens George, MD GEN SL & CEO Innovations SL & Innovations Axistalks about his vision of a vibrant and effective entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Freetown Pitch Night is part of efforts to enable the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Sierra Leone that will support a new breed of value creating entrepreneurs, and over the course of 2018 we saw some significant gains in our efforts to map, connect and enable the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

The event established itself as the country’s most successful gathering of entrepreneurs.  More than 60 entrepreneurs pitched an idea or a post revenue business. Around 1000 people attended Pitch Nights through the year. The Pitch event for the Mayor stood out as the largest single attended event with an audience of almost 170. We also provided services to the IOM and Government of Japan, Cordaid, The Directorate for Science, Technology and Innovation-DSTI.

2018’s themes included Agtech, Fintech, Digital Disruptors, Waste to Wealth, Social Entrepreneurship, Sustainable Designs, Lifestyle and Wellness (SG3), EdTech, Agribusiness and BDS. In 2019, we will bring in four new themes – Water, Sustainable Energy, Creative Arts and Photography and AI.

It is critical not to confuse support for entrepreneurship and innovation with the generic strengthening of the “business climate”. The business climate includes both incumbents and new entrants. Our focus is on new entrants. These new entrants are of a particular type; Schumpeterian Entrepreneurship.These are Sierra Leoneans that are disrupting existing business models; they are operating in very uncertain times; they see the value of technology; they are not rent seeking but yearn to create value that is consistent with their values. They operate, nonetheless in an environment that is characterised by the high cost of communication and internet; with meagre human resources in the tech space; and with a non-existent entrepreneurial ecosystem. Yet the capacity of these entrepreneurs to innovate is just as strong as similar entrepreneurs in other parts of the world.

We have created engagement and awareness of the significance of an entrepreneurial ecosystem as the key to creating jobs, growing the economy, and fostering social cohesion through innovation and entrepreneurship.

In 2019 we will start to see the move from a nascent ecosystem to one that becomes more dynamic. We still have some way to go, but 2018 saw several significant signs. I will just mention two.  

One of these was the enthusiasm to engage by ecosystem players. We saw this clearly with the number of top executives and personalities who were prepared to give their time to either sit on the panel or become a mentor for a start-up. This is tremendously encouraging.

The second is the appointment of Dr. David Sengeh as Chief Innovation Office of the Government of Sierra Leone. This is an historical first. Dr. Sengeh heads a new Department within State House. We are very encouraged by this development as the enabling environment component of the entrepreneurial ecosystem is critical to the success of entrepreneurs. We have worked with Dr. Sengeh on two occasions in 2018 and we look forward to more engagements in 2019.

I believe that we will see several promising start ups moving from ideation to concept and eventually minimum viable product (MVP) in 2019.

At our incubator and co-working space in Kingtom, we are already incubating ideas for using face recognition software in the healthcare space. We are looking to do the same in the banking sector. We are working on clean cooking technologies; and we have worked with entrepreneurs building blocks from plastic waste. Our focus is on design driven approaches to the use of digital technology to solve challenges in agriculture, the environment, financial inclusion and market access.

All this will take place at Innovations Axis, our newly established combined co-working, incubator and accelerator. Innovations Axis with, GEN SL and Innovation SL is a community that harnesses the creativity, talents and resources of diverse stakeholders to birth, incubate and scale up unlikely technological solutions to local issues with high impact!

We do three things at Innovations Axis:

• We find entrepreneurs disrupting and  solving important problems while creating impact in society.
• We coach entrepreneurs to be investment ready.
• We source funds to invest in a selected few.

Our focus is intentionally on these sectors; Agtech ( digital agriculture); and Waste to wealth (the circular economy).

I believe that for entrepreneurs to succeed, innovations have to be driven by a desire to solve challenges; business models have to be designed to scale and ultimately product/service development and delivery has to focus on the customer.

I believe that key will be blended models and convergence. For example, the convergence of Agtech and Fintech is quite exciting and I believe this will be key to scale. The convergence between ehealth and fintech is also exciting. Another exciting area is the convergence of Edtech/Fintech/eRecruitment.

What this means is that modular development within a design driven entrepreneurship framework is paramount. Therefore, the enabling of an entrepreneurial ecosystem with strong networking assets such as the Freetown Pitch Night, Sensi Tech Hub, Cordaid’s Accelerator programs, and Innovations Axis, to connect the other ecosystem actors – Human Capital, Economic Assets, Infrastructure and an enabling environment is of vital importance.

I also see vertically integrated business models (either forward or backwards) as the key to delivering value to customers and thereby making a profit. Given the level of fragmentation (and market inefficiencies) vertical integration is almost always necessary if the business is to scale.

We celebrate disruptive entrepreneurs in Accra, Nairobi, Kigali and Johannesburg. Yet, in Sierra Leone we have entrepreneurs that have built robots; design and developed a face recognition software; have create services utilising drone technology and even conceived of ideas for the 3D printing of agricultural equipment and small machinery.

What is lacking for these entrepreneurs to move these ideas from seed to start up and eventually growth, is a platform that contains channels and nodes. This platform is an entrepreneurial ecosystem. And it is the mapping, enabling, connecting and bringing to life of this ecosystem that is the basis, the fundamental aspect of the work we do.