The renowned scientist Charles Darwin was quoted as saying; “It is the long history of humankind, (and animal kind too), that those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”
I love this quote because it perfectly depicts my thoughts on today’s topic. I am a firm believer in collaborations and partnerships, even though I have heard people say partnerships do not work in this part of the world. This is one feedback I hear often, but I do not agree with because there is quite a number of proofs within and outside the ecosystem that show that partnerships indeed work.
By virtue of the unique position I occupy, I get a lot of people asking me for one form of partnership or the other. This is another pointer to the fact that for a number of reasons, many more people are eager about partnerships.
The Information and Communication Technology is a fast paced industry, whether software, hardware or cloud, innovation and speed is the norm. I have watched a number of businesses rush into the industry, invest a whole lot without understanding the distribution channels and within months, pack up.
Finding the right partners may have saved such companies a lot of headache but I am glad to report that this is changing gradually; at least in the industry where I belong, collaboration is becoming the norm.
If you look around, you’d observe that more and more start-ups are taking on partnerships and accepting them as the norm. This is something that must be encouraged.
Just recently, the news hit town that Cars45 had raised $5m Series A funding from Frontier Cars Group, a company backed by Balderton Capital, EchoVC, TPG Growth, and NEA. Interestingly, this start-up is about a year old and has four Co-Founders, namely, Etop Ikpe, Sujay Tyle, Iyamu Mohammed and Peter Lindholm. Isn’t this cool?
This is not to say that something may, or may not go wrong in future but it is quite refreshing to see young people getting together and creating solutions that solve real problems.
Across the various hubs in the East, West, North and South, young people are working together and collaborating more. In a few days, I will be visiting Roar Nigeria, the first full-fledged university embedded technology community in West Africa located right in the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
From what I gathered, those already being incubated in the hub are in teams, which help nurture team spirit and collaboration from an early stage. It is not just Roar; many other hubs are doing everything possible to make this — Finish Reading on the Punch Website
