Achieving success as a startup not only depends on the business knowledge you have but also the networks one is connected to.
When starting a business, it is important to develop professional and social contacts with mentors and other innovators but oftentimes the education institutions are left out of the circle.
Academia plays a crucial role in the ecosystem, in this week’s episode of Tech Trends, we had a chat with Dr. Henrietta Onwuegbuzie, Director of the MBA program at the Lagos Business School on the relevance of academia to the startup ecosystem.
CFA: Glad to have you on Tech Trends today
Henrietta: Thank you Fred for having me
CFA: All right, let’s start by having your thoughts on the tech ecosystem today
Henrietta: So the tech ecosystem is definitely growing, in fact, the whole world is going tech and so everybody needs to key in.
They don’t have a choice anymore and that’s exactly what we’re trying to do at the LBS with the MBA program to ensure that we help tech people understand that for you to run a sustainable business, you need to combine tech and business management knowledge but that’s the space that is doing amazing things, we’re proud of them, so far we have about four at least, I think there are two more upcoming Unicorns in tech space in Nigeria.
Nigeria probably has the highest number of Unicorns in all of Africa so it’s something that we want to be part of to ensure that they don’t just get but that they remain there and keep growing.
CFA: Again this is where we sort of have this conversation right, for a lot of people in tech, there is a feeling that they don’t need the conventional business education, what’s your take?
Henrietta: So it’s not about business education, the point is when you’re in tech, you’re in a business and like everything else in life, you need to learn how to do that as a business side to everything.
It’s either you get someone else to manage the business for you while you focus on the tech part but it’s an inevitable part of whatever anybody is doing, especially if that’s how you also hope to earn a living obviously ultimately, tech is there to you know, help us operate better… (Watch the full video here)
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