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A paradigm shift is underway in Kenya. New innovations are destroying old ways of doing business, and smart young start-up entrepreneurs are at the forefront of this quiet but historic transformation. Teams of skilled developers and programmers have sprung up in innovation hubs, incubators, and accelerators across the country to build information and telecom solutions that capitalize on the country’s mix of challenges and opportunities. At the same time, we have seen a number of spinoffs of Kenya’s unique entrepreneurial revolution reach across Africa and into other corners of the world, attracting global recognition for the country.

The Internet has witnessed a dramatic evolution since its launch in 1995, presenting a myriad of opportunities to society and to enterprises, in particular, through access to information. This evolution has also presented significant challenges, including new competition, changing customer engagement and business models, unprecedented transparency, privacy concerns, and cybersecurity threats. This chapter draws on the theory of disruptive innovation pioneered by Christensen (“, (2), 27–37”, 2001) in exploring the interplay of disruptive innovation and entrepreneurship in fueling rapid ICT growth in Kenya. The theory explained how a business model is likely to succeed by coming from the lower end of the market and eventually disrupting and taking over the market as the pioneers of each new technology or business process attempt to dominate their competitors. The theory is used to explain these phenomena and is adapted to examine not just the success of the business model, but also to explain the sustaining disruptive effects on the entire market by entrants as challengers of the incumbents. This provides a theoretical lens through which to view the market experience acquired through continuous market engagement by the author in a consultancy practice in Kenya over the last 20 years.

The twentieth century saw the economic rise of Asia through the significant economic rise of the “Asian Tiger” countries (Kojima 2000; UNCTAD 1996). But the twenty-first century has been dubbed the African century (Wikipedia 2016). Tech Crunch, renowned technology media company, recently published an article entitled “The Future Is African” (Nash 2015), which aptly described how Africa is unleashing innovation by combining mobile and Web technology to lead the world in the twenty-first century.

The chapter introduces market-enabling digital platforms as a new concept. By using a market structure framework that puts emphasis on salient market inefficiencies—also known as institutional voids—we find that digital platforms in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres have contributed significantly to the development of efficient market infrastructures and intermediaries. We review market-enabling digital platforms in Kenya elicited from previous research on digital entrepreneurship ecosystems, finding examples where Kenyan digital start-ups have achieved success by tackling institutional voids in the marketplace. The framework itself has significant value as a paradigm for explaining a theory of change about how start-ups can create or enhance market infrastructure through providing digital—rather than physical—infrastructure. The chapter also provides a new lens to help understand, conceptualize, and assess start-ups’ potential for contributing to market efficiency and economic vitality.

Knowledge and technology can combine to change societies dramatically, creating opportunities that were previously unthinkable. Many African nations now stand at the threshold of revolutionary changes based on information communication technologies (ICTs). Instead of painstakingly developing traditional banking, education, and other sectors—with decades of wasted human lives and opportunities—introducing mobile technology has put completely new solutions into the hands of a new generation. Some of the key elements of these new solutions are in education, the backbone for innovation and economic development. Although innovators are seeking new ways to educate the next generation, the problem of delivering adequate educational services to those without the means to afford expensive private schools is still a critical problem. We suggest that education must be , very nearly from the ground up. Once people take education out of the four walls of the traditional classroom into homes, libraries, internet cafés, and city streets, a completely new learning experience is imaginable—an experience that innovators need to harness now in order to the way in which education is delivered in Africa. Students in the “digital” school will decide what, where, and when to learn. We need these digital models to start reimagining education in Africa. We offer reimaginings of several elements in the education sector, including school management, the classroom, the learning experience, and certification.

As information and communications technologies (ICTs) and social enterprises are increasingly recognized for their role as drivers of economic growth, opportunities are continuously arising for new business models to address socioeconomic challenges and encourage innovation. This chapter examines the growth of social entrepreneurship in Kenya and demonstrates how businesses can create shared value in the field of technology. It illustrates the role of impact sourcing as a means of generating employment through an examination of Digital Divide Data (DDD) Kenya, the country’s innovative ICT program for the training and education of disadvantaged youth. The DDD case study sheds light on the potential of ICTs to transform businesses and provide an enabling environment for the development of technology-based social enterprise. The impact sourcing model used by DDD Kenya, it will be shown, provides opportunities for youth from low-income and disadvantaged backgrounds to acquire practical, hands-on professional training while pursuing higher education. It also highlights the challenges of setting up a social enterprise and casts light on a number of the lessons and best practices that can be taken up by other entrepreneurs.

This chapter investigates Global North paradigms of connectivity contrasted with those of Kenya. It examines the age of the cyber café and the transition into the mobile age that has defined Kenya’s ascent as a technology powerhouse—specifically, the ascent of mobile connectivity as a tool for Internet connectivity, and in particular, for social networking (and the factors of availability, affordability, and accessibility that have proved pivotal). The social networking service Twitter is the focus when it comes to social media. The microblogging network, in addition, is highlighted through initiatives, movements, and various hashtags inspired by online conversations and resulting in real-world outcomes. Before the adoption of localized trending topics, Kenyans on Twitter had their trends set on default to “Worldwide.” From 2010, when a fictional character in a Kenyan music video went viral, creating a global Internet sensation, the wheels were set in motion to see Kenyans discover their identity online and carve a niche as a globally respectable digital citizenry that was worthy of greater understanding and inspection.

Establishing information and communications technology (ICT) entrepreneurship ecosystems in resource-scarce contexts is difficult because these contexts lack important preconditions, such as financial resources, established ICT sectors, and relevant human capital. Current theoretical perspectives and policy prescriptions about them stem mainly from the Global North and provide little insight into how to establish these conditions “from scratch.” In 2016, numerous African countries are looking toward the continent’s ICT vanguard, Kenya, and its gradually maturing “Silicon Savannah,” asking themselves, “How did they do it?”

This chapter will shed light on the evolution of Kenya’s ICT ecosystem and explore the barriers and subsequent enabling processes encountered when growing an ICT ecosystem in a resource-scarce context. The insights offered here were developed over three years of doctoral research and especially through four months of qualitative research in Nairobi in 2013. The chapter provides a holistic perspective on the barriers and enablers encountered in the areas of culture, human capital, finance, policy, entrepreneurial support systems, and markets. Together with relevant theory on how ecosystems emerge and develop, these insights will be used to propose a model that explains how ICT ecosystems can emerge in resource-scarce contexts. The model shows how locally available enabling processes can be drawn on to substitute and establish the missing condition factors. Entrepreneurship support institutions, for example, emerged as pivotal enablers that can kick-start industry emergence processes, train human capital, and help establish conducive sociocultural norms. Further, the creation of initial market demand through developmental stakeholders and the inflow of expatriate entrepreneurs also emerged as enablers. The chapter ends with a call for critically needed research and specific recommendations for development stakeholders, governments, and practitioners in tackling current barriers in order to help develop ecosystems in resource-scarce countries beyond their nascent phase.

Why has the creation of technology start-ups in Nairobi remained so challenging—despite support from growing numbers of motivated entrepreneurs, innovation hubs, and interested seed-capital investors?

We took an in-depth look at a case study in Nairobi and discovered that because of technology entrepreneurship’s relative novelty, the key actors’ perspectives on the processes and practices associated with it are not yet aligned.

The results were that the actors’ social interactions are marked by contradictions, divergences, and ambiguities that have hampered the creation of successful technology businesses in region.

In this chapter, we will explore the challenges faced by today’s new forms of entrepreneurial activity in Kenya—and how to overcome them.

Back in 2014, a debate swept through the Kenyan tech sector about the value of grant funding for start-ups based on new technology. Swirling around the blogosphere, among Kenyans on Twitter, and entrepreneurs in the thick of it, the debate seemed to boil down to the question of whether grants from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and donor organizations interested in funding social enterprises in Kenya were a benefit or a hindrance. Put in less secular terms, many asked: Is grant funding a blessing or a curse? Key figures, like Nikolai Barnwell, at that time the manager of the technology business incubator 88mph, and Sam Gichuru, the manager of Nailab (a competing tech incubator), landed on one side or the other of the debate. Even now, more than a year after the debate peaked in social media, its question still lingers over Kenyan entrepreneurs.