The Minister of Communications Technology, Mrs Omobola Johnson, has said that the country needs to reverse its 90 per cent failure rate of local software in order to arrest the billions of naira that leave its shores annually as licence and other fees paid to foreign software companies.
Speaking at Tinapa Knowledge City, Calabar, Cross River State at the first day of the Institute of Software Practitioners of Nigeria (ISPON) 2013 National Software Conference and Competition with the theme: ‘Software Strategies for Retooling the Workforce,’ she said software strategies for Nigeria must not only be about improving productivity, but also about providing an avenue for transforming the economy, creating jobs and creating wealth.
“We need to tackle the broader challenge of how we take our promising software developers and software engineers and help them to become entrepreneurs that can take advantage of this opportunity,” she said, adding that an assessment of Nigeria’s software industry landscape revealed that stakeholders need to focus on the process of creation or ideation that ultimately results in a successfully executed software solution or platform.
They also harped on the need to keep sight of the fact that brilliantly written lines of code must still be considered as building blocks for the successful software companies that must be the ultimate target in building a viable software industry.
Johnson said: “With an accepted and well documented failure rate of 90 per cent in the software entrepreneurship space, we must accelerate and scale up the innovation process just like Silicon Valley, USA and Israel that have thousands of companies in the ideation or start up stage at any point in time that are acquired by bigger players or go on to become big players themselves.
She said Nigeria has made some progress in the short time that the ministry of communication technology has been in existence.
There is a thriving ecosystem of innovation hubs with the private sector participating well through the Co-Creation Hub, Venia Business Hub and others.
The government has also intervened with the set up of the iDEA hubs in Lagos and Calabar (with more to come) which aim to cover both the innovation and ideation process as well as accelerating the process from ideation to business creation.
“These are in essence efforts to give momentum to the developing ecosystem where our talented developers and budding entrepreneurs can come to find bandwidth, peer reviews as well as the all important mentoring, business training and access to finance networks that will help them to create companies out of their code,” she stated.
Source: Leadership