Addressing Venture Growth in Nigeria Through 'Entrepreneur-Centered' Design: A Framework for Accelerating Entrepreneurship Development Applied to Consumer Brand Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurship has long been seen by many as the key to socioeconomic growth and prosperity across Africa and particularly in Nigeria, where rising unemployment, the need to diversify away from crude oil export, and the high potential that exists across multiple sectors creates the opportunity for local entrepreneurs and their enterprises to be the driving force behind realizing this desired growth and prosperity. Despite this, various initiatives to drive entrepreneurship have been mixed at best, and a lot of commentary has made it clear that current approaches to overcome present barriers and accelerate entrepreneurship have not delivered as intended. In response, this work explores the application of human centered design towards entrepreneurship development in Nigeria by centering the entrepreneur and producing a framework that can be used by other stakeholders to more deeply understand the entrepreneur’s needs and lived experiences, which can then serve as a foundation for more genuine and impact solutions. Through this research, the case is also made for framing this challenge as the responsibility of the entire ecosystem (as opposed to pinning it all on a single entity) and intentionally focusing on venture growth and scale (as opposed to venture creation alone), with the approaches to interviews, persona creation, and need discovery all reflecting this position. A demonstration of this framework is also included with the needs, desires, and experiences of consumer brand entrepreneurs based in Nigeria being explored and surfaced. In this demonstration, additional guidance on how to apply this approach more generally is provided, as well as recommendations on what is truly needed to enable this class of entrepreneurs to take advantage of their unique position to contribute greatly to the nation’s economic development.S.M