Michael Zylstra making a presentation at the summit
Michael Zylstra, Chief Strategy Officer at Dentsu Aegis, a global media group that specialises in media, digital and creative communications services, has urged African businesses and governments to stop concentrating on the importation of technologies from overseas.
He admonished those businesses in Africa to consider funding entrepreneurs to create technologies that meet the specific and critical needs of Africa.
Mr Zylstra made the call on Friday in Accra while making a presentation at the maiden edition of the Ghana Innovation Summit 2018 held under the theme, “Innovating The Way Brands Are Built.”
Africans, he said, must create their own technologies that are representative and with Africans in mind such as the mobile money invention.
“What I think we need to start doing is to create our own technologies that are representative,” according to him.
“We have to create the environment that fosters and advance African innovation,” he said.
Technology and innovation should partly be funded by ad agencies, media agencies and clients, Mr Zylstra said.
He added that “our clients spend millions of dollars buying media and what we are recommending to them now is that they set aside a small portion of their budgets to fund African entrepreneurs in the technology space to create products that address the African issues.”
He explained that Africans need to innovate and produce technologies suitable for their national context instead of continuously importing technologies from overseas.
Innovation is about representation, understanding consumer need and not just focusing on the technology for technology sake, according to him.
Critical attention, he said, ought to be paid to the way technologies are applied in solving Africa’s problems, stating that even when Africans want to import technologies, they should take into account the context in which the technologies are going to be used.
He highlighted the termed “inherent biases” associated with the importation of technologies.
Funding Challenges
Dentsu Aegies Africa Region Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Dawn Rowlands, pointed out that there was huge funding challenges facing African entrepreneurs in the technology space which ought to be addressed through arrangements such as venture capital projects or partnerships.
But CEO of Dentsu Aegis Network Ghana, Andrew Ackah, stressed the need for a dialogue and collaboration between ad agencies, African technology entrepreneurs and businesses to find ways of developing technologies that suit the African context and how funding could be made available for creating those technologies.
By Melvin Tarlue