Leaders of startups and business incubation movements gathered in Lagos to discuss ways of using accelerators to boost youth-led enterprises’growth, DANIEL ESSIET reports.
The conference attracted incubation managers and startup growth coaches.
The business incubators and accelerators stakeholders forum on growing youth enterprises, which held in Lagos, addressed gaps inhibiting growth and development and proffered ways to create job opportunities.
Passion Incubator founder, Olufunbi Falayi, said business incubators are platforms for economic development.He said his organisation is determined to provide a functional incubator that would boost entrepreneurship.
He said most entrepreneurs need help through fundraisers, or business pitching, while successful enterprises require infrastructural support, saying the challenge for most incubators is how to attract the right enterprises to their programmes.
Falayi said the incubator must continually strive to produce more and more successful entrepreneurs, pointing out that this will require that they have a good pre-incubation set of support and robust selection.
He stressed the need for incubators and accelerators to adopt better approaches to increasing the numbers of new businesses.
West Africa Regional Chapter Coordinator at Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE), Olatunji Ajani, said the meeting was meant to provide specific insights into how incubators and accelerators are responding respond to youth enterprise development.
He said the network is interested on how the incubators and accelerators can support youth enterprise development, youth center development, accelerator and incubator processes for supporting innovation and business.
He stressed the need to build the eco system to help young people seek their knowledge and services to learn how to set up successful businesses.
He said the event was sponsored by Oxfam Nigeria and supported by Global Accelerator Learning Initiative (GALI). ‘’It is focused on how the incubators and accelerators in Nigeria are supporting youth own enterprises. The findings from the meeting and other desk research would be used to develop knowledge brief for the ecosystem and how youth can make the best of incubators and accelerators,’’ he added.
Executive Director, MindtheGap, Tayo Olosunde, said his organisation is running programmes to transform the youth from job seekers to job creators, and make them more relevant to the development of the medium and small enterprises.
He said incubators and accelerators are an important component of the startup eco-system infrastructure that supports new business formation and growth. This type of infrastructure, he added, can advance business formation, create and retain jobs, commercialise technologies, and accelerate the delivery of new products and services to the marketplace.
Wennovation Hub co-founder, Oluwole Odetayo, said business incubators help to reduce the incidences of failure in early stage companies and this results in the financial viability and growth of firms that it supports.
He said there are also evolving models of business incubators, offering services to entrepreneurs. This, according to him, is particularly important as they have impact on economic growth through innovation and entrepreneurship.
He said accelerators offer impact enterprises support across their spectrum of needs as they seek to scale.
He said the economy needs incubators that can engage with early-stage businesses and help to turn startups into success stories. On the other hand, high-growth businesses are those that have a scalable business model and achieve significant short-term revenues and employment growth.
The post ‘How young innovators can grow’ appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.