“Today, I had a wonderful learning experience at @CUHEBRON Startup Lab though I studied at the University of Lagos, I saw why Covenant University is the best University in Nigeria concerning entrepreneurship,” Kayode Mfolorunsho Falayi, an English Language graduate of the University of Lagos post on his Facebook timeline recently.
“They have built an ecosystem for their students to succeed and I was really fascinated by what I saw in the environment especially the support given to these start-ups.”
Hebron Start-up Lab is Covenant University’s start-up accelerator established to help students and faculty members take their ideas and research outcomes from concept to product to market. Reputed to be the first University Start-up Accelerator in Nigeria, it helps to take research with market potentials beyond the bookshelf.
The Hebron Start-up Labs is a technology hub wholly funded and run by the management of Covenant University. Having run in different experimental phases for over 4 years, the management of the hub decided to give it a more serious approach in 2015. It was not until early in 2017 that they finally secured a workspace approved by the school authority to carry out full operations, a report by Techpoint outlined.
Some of the concepts incubated at the Start-up Lad that have developed into thriving businesses included Piggvest, an online savings platform that makes saving possible by combining discipline plus flexibility. Softcom, an engineering company with the ambitious goal to improve the way people live, learn and work in Africa. Some of its products are PassID (identity), Koya (Learning), Eyowo (Payment) and DataBeaver (Data).
One more company that is the outcome of Covenant University’s Hebron Start-up Lab is Thrive Agric, an online platform that brings together investors and farmers.
For technology enthusiasts, the Hebron Start-up Labs adds another level of validation to the Nigerian ecosystem and also signals that investment in entrepreneurship is necessary to spur economic development, with technology as a frontier.
This mirrors the role of Stanford University in the development of Silicon Valley’s development. The presence of Stanford University was a key factor in the development of the technology enterprise now known as Silicon Valley. More than anything, it was Frederick Terman (one-time engineering dean at Stanford University), his students, and the encouragements and opportunities that he gave them that enabled this great enterprise to flourish.
As of 2011 nearly 5,000 companies existed which could trace their roots to Stanford, including Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, Yahoo, and Google.4 Electronics pioneer William Hewlett wrote in 1991 of the role of Stanford professor and its former Provost, Frederick Terman.
Stanford University was founded by Leland Stanford, a former governor of California and United States senator who had made his fortune in the railroad industry.
From its inception in 1891, Stanford’s leaders saw its mission as service to the Western United States, to serve as a counterpoise to the region’s exploitation by Eastern economic interests. Stanford looked to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as a model, reflecting the fact that MIT functioned as an incubator of new firms.
Tertiary institutions remain key players in the growth and development of any functional ecosystem for technology innovation. This means tertiary institutions feed the ecosystem with the requisite skilled and intellectual stimuli to scale its growth.
Most tertiary institutions in Nigeria have been widely criticised for their exaggerated bent for theories and abstract knowledge as opposed to solving practical everyday life problems. This is changing though, with a few tertiary institutions beginning to implement strong practical technology curricula. These allow students to take up a career in tech or easily blend into careers outside of tech.
STEPHEN ONYEKWELU
