#1 Efosa Ojomo - About the 'Prosperity Paradox', disruptive & market-creating innovations and why capital has to be patient in Africa
14 January 2024
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1 Guest Bio
2 Episode Description
3 Show Notes
4 Time Stamps
5 Transcript
1 Guest Bio
Efosa Ojomo (@efosaojomo) is a renowned Nigerian author, researcher and speaker. He is a leading expert on disruptive innovation, which he defines as innovations that create new markets and make existing products and services more accessible and affordable in low and middle-income countries.
He is the director of the Global Prosperity research group at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, a think tank based in Boston and Silicon Valley, and is a senior research fellow at the Harvard Business School. He is also a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on Innovation.
In January 2019, Ojomo and late Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen published The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty. The book outlines a powerful framework for creating prosperity, and concludes that the key to economic development is not to focus on copying the developed world, but rather to identify and invest in disruptive innovations that can create new markets and opportunities for the poor.
In a review, the Wall Street Journal wrote that the book provides ‘a better way to fight poverty’ as it returns ‘the entrepreneur and innovation to the centre stage of economic development and prosperity’.
His work has been published and covered by the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, The Guardian, Quartz, Forbes, Fortune, The World Bank, NPR, and several other media outlets. He has presented his work at TED (a 2019 TedTalk on corruption and innovation which has garnered over 2 million views), the Aspen Ideas Festival, the World Bank, Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and at several other conferences and institutions.
Ojomo is a recipient of the 2020 Thinkers50 Radar award, the world’s most reliable resource for identifying, ranking, and sharing the leading management ideas of our age. The award is given to emerging management thinkers who have the potential to shape the future of business at an event that is described by the Financial Times as ‘the Oscars of management thinking’.
Efosa graduated from Vanderbilt University with a degree in computer engineering and received his MBA from Harvard Business School.
His influence extends beyond the business and academic realms, as his work continues to inspire individuals and organisations to embrace the principles of disruptive innovation as the key driver of global prosperity.
2 Episode Description
Did you ever come across that popular optical illusion, which invited you to look at a black and white picture, and then prompted you to describe what you saw?
Did you first see the old woman or the young woman? (read this for a little background on this phenomenon)
This is what this week’s episode reminded me of. Efosa Ojomo invites us to look at emerging markets, and concedes we can see them one way (let's call it, ‘the old woman way’) but then challenges us to look at the same picture in a different way (the ‘young woman way’), to understand what market-creating innovations can do to create a different outcome for countries and their people, in short, to enable them to prosper.
In the episode he discusses the principles of The Prosperity Paradox and explains why ‘sustaining’ and ‘efficiency’ innovations don’t lead to inclusive prosperity, but ‘market-creating’ innovations do.
He uses clear examples to illustrate what is possible if policy-makers, investors, companies and individuals (entrepreneurs) change their approach to struggling economies and invest long-term in solving a problem. He highlights the limitations of common economic development models, which tend to be top-down, and offers a new framework for economic growth.
3 Show Notes
03:32 The White Man’s Burden by William Easterly
05:34Â Awarded the Nr 1 Management Thinker in the World Professor Clay Christensen
13:33Â Author Karen Dillon
18:17Â Apple Worldwide Developers Conference WWD23
20:24 Richard Leftley and MicroEnsure
20:28 The Story of Tolaram’s Indomie Noodles (video)
23:19Â About Tolaram
27:13 Efosa Ojomo’s TED talk: Reducing corruption takes a specific kind of investment June 2019 and TEDxBYU A Counterintuitive Solution to Poverty: Stop Trying to Eradicate It, March 2019
34:12 Research by Lant Pritchett
38:12 Richard Leftley and MicroEnsure in Africa
4 Time Stamps
02:49 Efosa Ojomo tells the background story to his book The Prosperity Paradox
06:35 Why Efosa moved to the United States
08:18 Why the story of a young girl carrying water at 3am changed Efosa's trajectory
11:01 The genesis of The Prosperity Paradox
16:24 The importance of understanding the key categories of consumption and non-consumption
17:54 Explanation of three different types of innovations: ‘sustaining’ innovations, ‘efficiency’ innovations and ‘market-creating’ innovations
22:14 The inspiring story of Indomie Noodles and how they created a new market in Nigeria
24:52 The need for countries to take ‘internal risks’ and invest in key infrastructure themselves
29:23 Barriers to consumption and how they represent opportunities to companies and entrepreneurs, not obstacles
32:42 Push vs pull investments and how pull investments create a whole new ecosystem around a newly created market
34:59 How to approach the reality of the existence of a small middle-class in a country
38:00 What it looks like when a country commits and invests long-term
42:18 Why capital coming into Africa needs to be patient
44:25 What young African leaders and individuals can do, to contribute to creating market-creating innovations
46:05 Efosa’s next book
47:03 How optimistic is Efosa?
5 Episode Transcript
More on Efosa Ojomo:
Ted Talks by Efosa Ojomo (videos)
TED talk: Reducing corruption takes a specific kind of investment, June 2019Â
TEDxBYU talk: A Counterintuitive Solution to Poverty: Stop Trying to Eradicate It, March 2019
Articles by Efosa Ojomo
The process of market creation demystified, by Efosa Ojomo
Our latest research - Accelerating the adoption of solar energy in Nigeria: A market-creating strategy, by Efosa Ojomo & Sandy Sanchez
What is disruptive innovation? by the Clayton Christensen Institute
Books by Efosa Ojomo
