A country’s knowledge capital can be estimated looking at what it produces and sells to the rest of the world. Today a bulk of Ghana’s economic growth is coming from selling resources we dig from the ground and ship outside. That is not sustainable. The only way we can generate the next big level of economic growth is by harnessing our existing knowledge through innovation and entrepreneurship. We need to create more high value jobs, in the face of a tsunami of global competition.
Over the last decade or so, countries and regions have struggled with the fact that most of their startups grow to about 8-20 employees, and then their growth stalls out. Soon, they begin to wither and die, or struggle along on life support from government handouts. How can Ghana take the lessons learned from other regions, and ensure that more of our young ambitious companies achieve sustainable growth, create high value jobs and suppliers, and earn their rightful place on the regional or even global stage?
To help provide some answers to this question, The Songhai Group are working with Ken Morse, the founder and MIT’s Entrepreneurship programme to build upon these learnings and tie into other entrepreneurship hubs around the world to run a series of training workshops specifically designed to provide the most appropriate coaching and support for Ghana’s most ambitious firms, large and young, to scale and sell to companies globally.
Ghana Go Global (3G) is a global growth programme to enable ambitious innovative companies to achieve their full potential. The carefully selected companies with high potential for global growth seek to increase their annual revenues by 800% – 1000% within 5 years. The programme, led by Songhai and Entrepreneurship Ventures, provides training and coaching, and then creates links to European and US customers, and the Boston entrepreneurial ecosystem. Local companies will be connected not only to innovative companies but also gain access to centers of excellence such as MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and the Kendall Square/Route 128 entrepreneurial ecosystem. Companies will be taught and coached by experienced business people with proven track records who will deliver just in time training, and design a custom coaching programme for each participating company. This programme has been run successfully in USA, UK, Spain, Canada and Turkey.
Under the Ghana Go Global (3G) Programme, Ghanaian entrepreneurs who want to be coached, not by academic theory, but by other successful entrepreneurs who have launched multimillion dollar companies and have walked in their shoes, who know what works (and what doesn’t), and have demonstrated repeated success in the cruel crucible of the marketplace. Why shouldn’t new companies emerge from our local pool of talent to tie in with a global venture community and be the ones who list on Wall Street and dominate their markets globally?
Ken Morse, a founding Managing Director the MIT Entrepreneurship programme (1996-2006) and a serial entrepreneur himself who has launched 6 high tech companies (3Com, Aspen Technology and 4 other startups), and a global sales veteran will lead the discussion. In his words, “Five either had IPOs or were successfully merged; one was a complete disaster.” Not a bad track record for a man who subsequently served for 13 years as Founding Managing Director of The MIT Entrepreneurship Center, and co-founded President Obama’s National Advisory Council for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (NACIE) with Steve Case.
Ken has been active for over 30 years commercializing novel technologies and bringing inventions from lab to market. He is Chairman and CEO of Entrepreneurship Ventures which he founded a dozen years ago, convening an experienced team of practitioners and serial entrepreneurial to deliver workshops in Columbia, Canada, Europe (Norway, Romania, Scotland, Spain, The Netherlands) Middle East (Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia,, Syria, UAE), Pakistan, and New Zealand. He holds a Bachelor of Science from MIT and an MBA from Harvard Business School and has been a visiting professor at the ESADE Business School since 2009.