School of Business, Invention and Venture Creation

This School was added to the Forward architecture on the specific instruction of the founders, and it answers a question the other nine Schools cannot answer alone. Those Schools produce people who can build; this School produces people who can build something that did not exist before and turn it into an enterprise that employs others. Africa's employment arithmetic makes the distinction urgent: the continent adds ten to twelve million labour market entrants a year against roughly three million formal jobs created, which means the graduate who creates a job is worth several who compete for one. The School is deliberately different from the School of Digital Business, Finance and Enterprise. That School builds the analysts, financiers, operators and assurance professionals who make existing enterprises run intelligently. This School builds inventors and founders: people who prototype hardware and software, protect and licence what they create, assemble capital, and take a product from a bench to a market. Every programme is driven by technology and, in every case, by artificial intelligence, not as a subject bolted onto a business degree, but as the leverage that allows a small African team to build something a large foreign one would otherwise have built first. The School operates on a workshop and studio model. Its centre of gravity is the Forward Venture Studio and the Invention Workshop, and its unit of assessment is a working artefact with a user, not a business plan with a reader.

Departments

5

Degree programmes

10

Credit units

1,136

Award levels

3

Source: Curriculum Compendium, Path One, page 945.