Craig Holmes, IBM’s Vice President, Cognitive Solutions for MEA region, strongly believes that innovation is deeply rooted in the availability of needs. Speaking to TechCity last week in Las Vegas USA at IBM’s World of Watson, he said this is the major reason why innovation springs forth more from the grassroots.
“Innovation comes from the grassroots level. It is often said that innovation springs better when people have a need,” he said.
While admitting that the company’s frontline cognitive computing technology, Watson, is less popular in Africa in comparison to the USA and other developed countries, he said the company’s innovations are being actively deployed in various parts of Africa through the research centers in Kenya and South Africa.
With Africa rapidly moving from a mobile first to a mobile only continent, he said IBM is focusing on mobile in Africa.
“Just six weeks ago, we announced that two of the scientists at the South African research lab have developed a bracelet that helps in identifying and ultimately recording tuberculosis. The bracelet itself is manufactured in such a way that it does not look like a medical bracelet so that the stigma of those wearing it is not there. And we are looking at what we can do with our analytics – look at the spread, communities we can impact and provide education around that,” Holmes said.
With Africa rapidly moving from a mobile first to a mobile only continent, he said IBM is focusing on mobile in Africa.
“Most of what we do in Africa is focused on mobile, mobile is the foundation of initiative in Africa and so telecommunication companies, governments, health and others are our major focus for engagement in Africa. We’ve done a lot in Kenya largely around the research center providing basic information services. Most of what we do in Africa is driven by mobile, mobile is the foundation,” the IBM VP said.
While expressing the company’s interest in – and commitment to – Africa, he said they are striving to get more Nigerian students and faculty members to know about IBM’s solutions essentially through a 9-month course that has already produced 16,000 graduates in Africa.
“We’ve had about 16,000 students. We actually built a training program where we are working with a number of universities across Africa for the 9-month program where we take students through the basics of cloud which we think will fundamentally change the way application and workload are consumed, a number of our analytics platforms, and some of our social and mobile technologies. We put all of that into a 9-month training course.”
