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Innovation in Africa: A View from the Peaks and Hilltops of a Spiky Continent*
By David A. Wernick, Florida International University College of Business
*From the forthcoming book Innovation in Emerging Markets, edited by J. Haar and R.
Ernst (Palgrave, 2016). Please do not circulate or quote without consent of author.
ABSTRACT: There is growing interest among scholars and practitioners in African innovation. Some contend that the continent's recent economic boom is largely a homegrown phenomenon, driven primarily by indigenous entrepreneurs developing local content for continental consumers. But is this true? To what extent is Africa's impressive economic performance in recent years the result of internal dynamics and which actors and institutions are most responsible? This chapter examines the state of innovation across the
African continent, with a particular focus on sub-Saharan Africa. The authors identify key facilitators of innovation in the private, public, and non-profit sectors, as well as obstacles to the continent’s continuing innovation-led economic expansion.

I. Introduction
In a widely read 2005 article in the Atlantic Monthly, author Richard Florida argued that with respect to innovation, the world is anything but flat. Given the way that creative talent, technical expertise, and financial capital tend to cluster in a handful of hubs or
“peaks” around the world – places such as New York, San Francisco, London, Berlin, and
Tokyo – the world’s innovation topography is best described as “spiky” (Florida, 2005).
Although Africa, to borrow Florida’s metaphor, has few innovation peaks of global significance and lots of valleys (and indeed, plenty of chasms), the continent does contain a growing number of hills, wherein entrepreneurs are taking advantage of late-comer advantages in technology to design new products, reengineer olds