Design for Innovation: The Case of the Innovation for African Universities Programme

In this talk we will share our experience as part of a Centre of Excellence facilitating a design process for 24 projects across Sub-Saharan Africa aimed at developing university-led entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystems in ways that would improve student employability outcomes. Design has been seen as a way of bridging the gap between creative thinking and innovation, putting new ideas into practice. In the Innovation for African Universities (IAU) programme, 2021-23, our aim as the Centre of Excellence was to work with projects to help them identify ways of putting their new ideas about how to address the youth unemployment crisis into practice. Our programme of support was delivered online to professional participants in 5 countries (Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and the UK), many of whom were operating in resource constrained contexts, where access to devices and broadband coverage was limited. We report how the IAU programme’s objectives were successfully achieved, despite such constraints, and propose that the principles and guidelines we developed for this programme may also be useful in developing other similar programmes.

About the speaker:

Dr Sara Jones is a Reader in the Faculty of Management at Bayes Business School and Director of the interdisciplinary Centre for Creativity in Professional Practice. Sara’s research and practice takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of creativity and design thinking in the contexts of innovation, education and entrepreneurship. During the course of her career, she has been a principal or co-investigator on funded research grants and contracts, together worth around £13 million, and has published over 120 peer- reviewed papers in academic conferences and journals. Sara has consulted for a number of major organisations, and supervised 9 PhD students to completion. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from City, University of London.