Blog Post

By Chris Armstrong The EU Horizon 2020-funded African European Maker Innovation Ecosystem (mAkE) Project, in which Open AIR is an African partner, has published its flagship policy...

The Summit was part of a series of events that took place in Egypt in conjunction with the Global Entrepreneurship Week. A2K4D’s Senior Research Officer, Nagham El Houssamy, participated in the summit, speaking on the Data-Driven Innovation Panel on Friday, November 18.

By Jane Ezirigwe In late January, I had the privilege to be selected as one of the scholars to be part of the Harvard Law...

By Helen Chuma-Okoro and Nicole Tumaine This is part two of Helen Chuma-Okoro and Nicole Tumaine’s blog post on the insights retained from 2018 conferences,...

By Mnena Abuku Pottery is an ancient art in Nigeria and is practiced in different parts of the country. It has high value for the tourism industry...

By Ghati Nyehita My ongoing Open AIR, Queen Elizabeth Scholar - Advanced Scholars (QES-AS), research project discusses the extent which South Africa’s copyright and design laws...

By Sara Yassine Over the past six months, the Research Laboratory Entrepreneurship and Management of Organizations (LABO-EMO) and Open AIR have been looking at ways...

The sharing economy has been growing at an ever-accelerating pace throughout the world as peer-to-peer networks and collaborative company models continue to pop up. The sharing economy, according to Rachel Botsman, is “an economic model based on sharing underutilized assets, from spaces to skills to stuff, for monetary or non-monetary benefits.” They often involve platforms that enable the exchange of services between peers or businesses. Arun Sundarajan explains the sharing economy somewhat differently: “What is new, in the “sharing economy,” is that you are not helping a friend for free; you are providing these services to a stranger for money.” He describes this as “crowd-based capitalism.”

Our Open AIR researcher Dr. Erika Kraemer-Mbula is continuing her exciting research in South Africa about informal sector entrepreneurs. Informal entrepreneurship is receiving increasing scholarly and political attention in Africa. The continent’s booming youth population calls for an unprecedented need to create income and livelihood opportunities. Besides the traditional focus on formalisation, there is a growing interest in understanding the creative processes and innovations occurring in informal enterprises. However, evidence remains scarce, and research on informal enterprises still represents a relatively new and unexplored frontier.

By Lilian Nantume* The education and dissemination of knowledge about Intellectual Property Rights for small women-owned businesses in Uganda is still in its infancy. Unfortunately,...