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Student founders and mentors testing a product prototype in an incubator workshop
School 10

School of Business, Invention and Venture Creation

Where an idea becomes a patent, a product and a payroll

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
12
Credit units
1,286
Award levels
3

Source: Curriculum Compendium, Path One, page 945.

Departments and degrees

5 departments, 12 degree programmes

Every degree below is published in the Curriculum Compendium with a full term-by-term and block-by-block curriculum, programme learning outcomes and an employment thesis.

01

Department of Artificial Intelligence Product and Platform Ventures

Building companies whose product is an intelligent system: model backed products, agents, data network effects, evaluation, unit economics of inference and platform design.

2 degrees
Department page
02

Department of Technology Commercialisation and Intellectual Property

Patents, industrial designs, trade marks, trade secrets, licensing, technology transfer, valuation and the commercial routes out of a laboratory.

2 degrees
Department page
03

Department of Enterprise Growth, Capital and Scale

Company formation and governance, financial modelling, fundraising, sales, operations and the discipline of scaling an African business across borders.

3 degrees
Department page
04

Department of Frugal Innovation and Social Enterprise

Invention under severe constraint, appropriate technology, impact measurement, and enterprise models that serve low income customers profitably and honestly.

1 degree
Department page
05
3 degrees
Department page
06
1 degree
Department page

Open now · First accreditation wave

Programmes accepting applications

Explore the study options currently open in School of Business, Invention and Venture Creation, then compare their curriculum, entry requirements and career directions.

Showing 12 of 12 programmes

BSc (Hons)Hybrid · 3 years (6 semesters) · Intake August 2027

Bachelor of Science in Artificial Intelligence Product and Platform Ventures

The cost of building software has collapsed and the cost of distributing it is near zero, which means the binding constraint on an African software venture is no longer engineering headcount but judgement: what to build, for whom, with what...

Includes 12 months paid work-integrated learning

Programme and employment thesis
BSc (Hons)Hybrid · 3 years (6 semesters) · Intake August 2027

Bachelor of Science in Digital Product Management and Platform Growth

Product management is one of the highest paid and most remote accessible professions in technology, and it is almost entirely closed to African graduates because it is conventionally entered after years in another role. That gatekeeping is ...

Includes 12 months paid work-integrated learning

Programme and employment thesis
BSc (Hons)Hybrid · 3 years (6 semesters) · Intake August 2027

Bachelor of Science in Frugal Innovation and Social Enterprise

The majority of Ugandans are not a market that existing products are designed for, and the conventional response has been charity, which does not scale, or discounted imports, which do not last. Frugal innovation is the third answer: design...

Includes 12 months paid work-integrated learning

Programme and employment thesis
BSc (Hons)Hybrid · 4 years (8 semesters) · Intake August 2027

Bachelor of Science in Invention and Product Engineering

Africa consumes physical products designed elsewhere and assembled elsewhere, and the reason is not an absence of ideas. It is the absence of people who can carry an idea across the distance between a sketch and a manufacturable specificati...

Includes 12 months paid work-integrated learning

Programme and employment thesis
BSc (Hons)Hybrid · 3 years (6 semesters) · Intake August 2027

Bachelor of Science in Startup Engineering and Enterprise Growth

Most African ventures do not fail at the idea. They fail somewhere between the tenth customer and the hundredth employee, in the unglamorous machinery of hiring, cash management, sales process, systems and governance. That machinery is a te...

Includes 12 months paid work-integrated learning

Programme and employment thesis
BSc (Hons)Hybrid · 3 years (6 semesters) · Intake August 2027

Bachelor of Science in Technology Commercialisation and Intellectual Property

African universities and research institutes produce inventions that are never protected, never licensed and never manufactured, and the loss is invisible because nobody counts it. Technology transfer is a trained profession everywhere it w...

Includes 12 months paid work-integrated learning

Programme and employment thesis
PhDHybrid · 3 to 5 years · Intake August 2027

Doctor of Philosophy in Innovation, Invention and Technology Entrepreneurship

Doctoral research on how invention, commercialisation and venture creation actually work in African conditions — a body of knowledge that is currently thin, largely imported and frequently wrong about the constraints that matter here. The p...

Includes 12 months paid work-integrated learning

Programme and employment thesis
MScHybrid · 12 months (2 semesters) · Intake August 2027

Master of Science in Enterprise Growth and Capital

Africa is full of small enterprises that never grow and promising companies that stall for want of capital and the capability to deploy it, and the missing profession is the growth operator who can take a viable business and scale it, and the capital professional who can finance that growth. This ...

Includes 0 months paid work-integrated learning

Programme and employment thesis
MScHybrid · 12 months (2 semesters) · Intake August 2027

Master of Science in Innovation Management and Intellectual Property Strategy

Universities, research institutes, ministries and large companies across the region are being asked to manage innovation portfolios and intellectual property estates without anyone trained to do it. This intensive programme prepares that ca...

Includes 12 months paid work-integrated learning

Programme and employment thesis
MScHybrid · 18 months (3 semesters) · Intake August 2027

Master of Science in Invention and Product Engineering

The continent consumes inventions it does not make, and the gap is not creativity but the disciplined capability to carry an invention across the long distance from an idea to a manufacturable, protected, sellable product. Invention and product engineering unites design, engineering, intellectual ...

Includes 0 months paid work-integrated learning

Programme and employment thesis
MScCampus · 18 months (3 semesters) · Intake August 2027

Master of Science in Product Invention and Advanced Prototyping

The gap between a working prototype and a manufacturable product is where African hardware ambition most often ends, and closing it requires a level of engineering and manufacturing judgement that a first degree rarely supplies. This progra...

Includes 12 months paid work-integrated learning

Programme and employment thesis
MScHybrid · 18 months (3 semesters) · Intake August 2027

Master of Science in Technology Entrepreneurship and Venture Building

A structured venture building programme for technically capable people who intend to found or lead a technology company, and for professionals converting into venture roles. Unlike conventional entrepreneurship masters programmes, the deliv...

Includes 12 months paid work-integrated learning

Programme and employment thesis
Browse the complete programme catalogue

Coming in future intakes

Planned, not yet accredited

These programmes are designed but will not open until the relevant accreditation wave is complete. We list them so the pipeline is visible, not to imply you can apply.

  • MSc Enterprise Growth and Capital · Future intake
  • MSc Invention and Product Engineering · Future intake
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