Tech Trends: How African Universities Can Commercialize Innovation And Research Works – Thomas Nastas

The nature of work is changing with the rise of automation and digital platforms. While there are positive impacts of these, there are also challenges.

We are yet to reach the full potential of digitization across the global economy and this makes it imperative that the younger generations are taught how to use available tools and technologies so they can be equipped with the right skills for the future.

On the Tech Trends show, I had a chat with Thomas Nastas, Founder Innovative Ventures where he discusses the importance of innovation today.

CFA: Glad to have you on the Tech Trends today.

Thomas: I appreciate your interest and I hope it’s engaging for you as it is for me.

CFA: All right. Let me start by asking you if you think about innovation today what comes to your mind?

Thomas: You know, innovation used to be thought of as just doing research. Now the idea of innovation is getting something into the hands of customers. How can you get whatever this is into the hands of customers?

If this is what the customers want, make sure this is what he or she gets. Don’t give them something else in place of what they actually want.

So, innovation is constant interaction with the marketplace, with potential customers, supply chain partners to make sure that you’re bringing something along the innovation chain to what people really want and need as a solution to their problems.

So, sometimes, customers don’t have a good way to articulate what their problems are. As innovators, we need to be able to probe and understand what their specific problems are even if we have they haven’t recognized them themselves.

CFA: Yes. Often times, innovators build stuff in their minds. How do we ensure innovators build what customers really want?

Thomas: Well, there are a couple of things we could do. One is, we could observe their behaviors, in their daily activities or we could ask them what their particular activity for this particular area that we’re probing to try to understand what issues or solutions they might be looking for even if they don’t know.

For example, before Apple came out with its iPhone, nobody was doing swipe right or swipe left. We’re always pressing buttons. By observing people pressing buttons, someone within the Apple team might have come up with a creative alternative way to interact with mobile devices.

You can watch the full interview here.