Innovation is the key to growing industry

Sweden is home to IKEA, a global furniture company, and Volvo, known worldwide as the epitome of car safety.

The small Scandinavian country scores highly on innovation rankings, but this was not always the case. At the turn of the century, the Swedish economy performed poorly until a solution was found in creating a national culture of innovation. Core curriculum changes were made to encourage children to explore ideas and create.

The manufacturing industry thrives on innovation, usually the result of research and development. For the past few years the United States’ manufacturing sector has seen fast growth in the field of computers and electronics. Korea has also emerged as a technological giant, thanks to its Samsung products.

This area has seen massive innovation in the past decade as the world moved from simple mobile phones to smartphones. Now there is industrial internet, which is seen as the next revolution in industry that calls for new approaches in manufacturing. The question is, if we in Kenya have not yet even caught up to 3D printing, how shall we keep up with industrial internet?

A skilled workforce is necessary to spark the industrial revolution we seek. We need people who do not only know what has already been done but can solve problems and come up with new ideas that can be applied both locally and at the global level. Our greatest innovative export is M-Pesa, which solved a local problem perfectly and is also relevant in different markets around the world.

We need more such innovations to spur growth. However, innovation needs creativity, tenacity, and risk-taking. We need to plant these seeds in our education curriculum.

In this technological age where children grow up with smartphones and cheap internet connectivity, it is possible to emulate Sweden’s success. Higher education should be a catalyst of industrialisation. Teachers and schools are the key agents to ensuring that graduates’ skills sets are relevant.

Our curriculum should aim to inculcate entrepreneurial mindsets for innovative skills to flourish. It should be transformative and help students explore, come up with great ideas, and turn them into profitable businesses.

Few local universities and polytechnics have as their stated goal the growth of entrepreneurs. A well-defined national innovation strategy is needed, together with a national road map towards this goal.

The latest Kenyan Economic Update released by the World Bank posited that the informal manufacturing sector was a challenge to the formal sector. We need to grow this sector by training and growing entrepreneurs in our tertiary institutions and encouraging practitioners to be more creative.

The rise of an age of industrial innovation also requires investment in research and development. It has been shown that for every dollar spent on research and development, two dollars are earned in return and a huge number of jobs are created.

We have to become a knowledge-based economy if our goal to be an industrialised nation, as laid out in Vision 2030 initiative, is to be realised. We will need to invest a lot more in our education and research to hasten our growth as an industrial nation.

The writer is the CEO designate of Kenya Association of Manufacturers. [email protected]