Fueling development, entrepreneurship and innovation, the Federal Government of Nigeria, will establish ICT hubs to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship in Nigeria, the Minister for Communication, Omobola Johnson has revealed. This will join privately owned Hubs – Co-Creation and Wennovation – that are towards similar objective.
Omobola Johnson said, the “Government has been the catalyst for the creation of innovation hubs in this country. Now what the innovation hubs are is that they are basically physical locations where young, aspiring ICT entrepreneurs can come if they have an idea that they want to implement through technology.
These centers will have very fast bandwidth, they will have testing tools, testing capabilities, they will be working with other young people that have ideas that they can tap into.
More importantly they will have some form of business mentorship because encouraging them is not only encouraging them to develop good software but it’s also ensuring that their ideas and their concepts can make some sense commercially. So they would have support infrastructure of people that understand marketing, people that understand finance to help them take their ideas from concept all the way to commercialization.
It’s not like that has not been done, there are a number of innovation hubs around the country but really and truly, for a country the size of Nigeria, for the opportunity that ICT presents to us, we need a number of these innovation hubs.”
