AfricaLive! - Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies

Africa has complex and unique business opportunities. This entrepreneurship course takes an interdisciplinary approach to building scalable businesses designed to solve core problems or fill institutional voids. Unlike other business courses, this one focuses on identifying points of opportunity for smart entrepreneurial efforts through “live” online lectures, peer-to-peer learning, and real-life lessons incorporated into your own business plan.

Taught by Harvard Business School Professors Tarun Khanna, Caroline Elkins, and Karim Lakhani, you will learn how Africa-specific trends impact the opportunities and challenges in undertaking entrepreneurship ventures on the continent. This course will examine the nuances that render Africa unique in today’s emerging market landscape, and the similarities that can be drawn from the world’s other fast-moving emerging economies. Developing your own business plan with peer-to-peer feedback is the capstone learning experience of this course.

The course will provide a series of time-tested lecture content and active reading assignments. Each week students will engage with course content and readings, and the week will end with a live webinar section that includes HBS faculty and leaders from the African business community. In addition, each student has the option to participate in the course’s week-by-week business plan development process. Business plan development will culminate with such students having an opportunity to submit a business plan. The best plans will be judged by a highly qualified African business jury. In so doing, the course will expose students to an unparalleled network of business academics at Harvard Business School, as well as Africa’s top business leaders.

Course content draws upon HBS cases and student tested and reviewed courses. They include the world-renowned Entrepreneurship in Emerging Markets course that has reached over half a million learners in 200 countries, and HBS’s four-day intensive MBA course, Africa Rising: Understanding Business, Entrepreneurship, and the Complexities of a Continent.

Students who complete the course will get a verified certificate from HarvardX, Harvard University's online learning platform.

Week 1: Identifying an opportunity - Institutional Voids

Institutional voids are a defining characteristic of emerging markets. To be an effective entrepreneur, one has to learn to not only find a way around these institutional voids but also render them into opportunities. This week’s sessions will define what is meant by institutional voids, how these voids are prevalent throughout emerging markets, and the ways in which two companies in different African regions and industries effectively turned these voids into opportunities. Ultimately, winning in an emerging market often comes when an entrepreneur builds upon a simple idea, but one that is needed to fill or circumvent a challenging institutional void.

Business Plan Building Commences: At the end of each week, students will apply the lessons learned as a guide to building a solid business plan. The first week, for example, will focus on getting an entrepreneur to think about opportunities available in their region, and get the participant to think about practical and insightful ways to size their market, think about the stakeholders that would be involved in launching their ventures, as well as thinking about what strategic advantages they have that would lead to success.

Week 2: Standardization and Scaling

How does an entrepreneur take a viable business model, and decide which aspects of it lend themselves to standardization so that it can help scale it across (parts of) the continent? Is scale best sought in a particular instance within a country, a region, or continent-wide? Related to this, how does one make the pitch to providers of growth capital? How, if at all, does that pitch differ from that made to attract start-up capital in the first instance? Capital can be obtained from a range of sources, each with its pros and cons.

Week 3: Thinking about your brand

In this week, students will focus on building a brand that garners broad-based support and loyalty. Brands communicate intangible promises – trust, integrity, reliability, respect, among others. On a practical note, how can brands be conceived and nurtured in environments where the specialist intermediaries often helpful in building brands are not always available (market research firms, advertising platforms, agencies that value brands)? How should one think of the cost of branding one’s venture? To what extent is the paucity of African brands an opportunity rather than a limitation for the astute entrepreneur?

Week 4: Defending your business model from its inception

At the heart of this week’s learning is the key question: How does an entrepreneur defend her idea? Put another way, how can you protect the results of your creativity? Patenting as a formal protective mechanism is sometimes useful, though for the most part has less utility in emerging markets such as those in Africa (compared to mature economies). So how can one think more holistically, by incorporating other barriers to imitation? What are the tradeoffs involved in doing so?

Week 5: Partnerships and Platforms

Students this week will consider multiple platforms – ranging from government-sponsored initiatives to technology and media platforms – that an entrepreneur can tap into as vehicles for success. Indeed, all entrepreneurs should consider actively leveraging such entities. Platforms lower the cost of customer access, allow one to contribute to and benefit from knowledge sharing, and permit the continued reinvention of the business.

Week 6: Launching your business venture

This week will focus on the execution of the business plan. All students participating in the business plan module will submit their final business plan in week six, and the course professors will choose a select number of plans for the final, live pitch session in front of a jury of African business leaders and experts. All students will be able to learn from, and comment on, the African jury’s selection process and the factors that African business leaders and experts consider when evaluating a business plan and pitch. The live session will then culminate in a course wrap up where the professors will offer students a review of the course’s key learnings.

There will be a live pitch session where finalists will present their pitches live to an jury of African business leaders and experts.