Microsoft,
Facebook, Google, Apple, the list goes on. All the aforementioned companies
were birth in colleges. Many more successful companies’ roots can be traced
back the colleges that the founders of these companies attended. Even though,
the trend is common in the West, the success of many college startups is a
manifestation of the fact that colleges may just be the best environment for a
startup.
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| UG and other colleges in Ghana also hold the Silicon Valley potential |
The success
or otherwise of a startup depends hugely on management. Students who are in
colleges usually have more time to spend on their startups than a
full-time-working-professional who is looking forward to making time in between
work in order to take care of personal company matters. The employed graduate always come home tired,
and with several other responsibilities, he/she gets to spend less time on
his/her personal startup whilst the college student has all the time in the
world to direct his/her startup.
In addition,
college students get to use the services of their tutors and colleagues at a
reduced rate if not for free as compared to a graduate who contracts the
services of other professionals. The college student who has less liabilities
in this case is duped for bigger assets than the graduate who spends higher
cash on crediting liabilities; because the balance sheet is very critical to
the financial strength of every firm. As a student startup flourishes in
assets, a grad startup languishes in liabilities. Some may argue that a
professional will do a better job than a college student; l do not for one
second buy this notion. The only difference between a graduate and a college
student is a piece of paper-certificate. The certificate does not do the job,
ability does the job. Further advantage of using a student for a job rather
than a professional is that students tend to explore more creative avenues in
the discharge of duties as compared to professional who mostly adopt methods
that are cast in iron and repeated over the years.
Furthermore,
the enclosed nature of colleges also make them an ideal ecosystem for business
startups. Take for instance, the time and technique that it would require to
understand and segment the populace of Ashaiman as a target market as compared
to the time and technique that it would take to understand and segment students
of University of Ghana or any other university for that matter as a target
market. The wide range of variables in the ‘’real’’ world makes it more
complicated for startups to understand thus explore the market avenues.
However, the simplicity of a somewhat enclosed environment like a university
campus enables startups to measure and reach their target market.
When you
examine circumstances under which companies like Aple, Microsoft, Google and
Facebook were born, l am convinced that Ghanaian students have an ideal
environment to carve a niche for themselves in the cooperate world. Numbers
also count a lot, and we are blessed with more numbers than Bill Gates and Mark
Zuckerberg had as primary target market. For example, Harvard had a student population
of about 20,000 when Mr. Zuckerberg started Facebook. Kwame Nkrumah University
of Science and Technology has a current student population of about 40,000. The
implication of a doubled population is that double as many as believed in
Zuckerberg’s idea could patronize a student of Kwame Nkrumah University of
Science and Technology’s startup-of same relevance as Facebook was eleven years
ago.
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