Africa's Largest Tech Entrepreneurship Course

Taking technology to market in Africa requires African known-how. So found 60+ African entrepreneurs with unique successes, and asked others to help interview. The topics that mattered were far from business school, like building rural distribution networks or networking in tribal cultures.

Leaders In Innovation Fellowship*

Each year, the LIF program picks hundreds of engineers, from Colombia to Egypt to China to Thailand, and helps them commercialise their inventions. Launched by The UK Royal Academy Of Engineering, and supported by the Newton Fund, we were selected to deliver from day one.

Peer learning gave LIF pinnacle status because it got consistently high results across the range of cultures and countries supported. It also outperformed lectures and coaching, both in applied knowledge and in commercial relationships made.

* In 2016, after 3 years of delivering LIF, we sold our operations in this project to Far Star, which operates under license from Source until 2019.

Small changes with big results

We've introduced peer learning to global networks, like City AI and Lean Startup Summit, immediately doubling satisfaction scores and seeing our formats syndicated. We also zoomed into to local challenges, like enabling Roma teenagers in Bulgaria to support each other to develop their own coding skills.

When a new discipline is still emerging, how do you educate people in that subject? There are no established experts, no books, and no agreement in best practices, so where do you begin?

Peer Learning Is...is a book about practical peer learning in different forms.

It covers our role models’ stories, like Harvard and Y Combinator in the US, MEST in Ghana, FarmHack in the Netherlands and Pirate Summit in Germany. And we share how we took what we learned from them to create some world-class education programs and globally-known communities of practice like The Sources, The Africa Prize For Engineering and the Lean Startup movement.

Get The Book

Salim Virani

Salim is an entrepreneur that fell into education. He founded Leancamp, a community which created the first evolutions of Lean Startup, and Founder Centric, which developed startup education for UCL, Oxford, Seedcamp, Techstars, Unilever, Microsoft, and other top-tier programs.

In ancient history, after leaving his job as Digital Director for a major marketing agency, Salim founded 3 technology companies in SaaS, e-commerce and IT outsourcing.

Bart Doorneweert

Fortune & failure have made Bart an entrepreneur, a scholar and a practitioner.

An agricultural engineer by training, Bart has started a cotton co-op in India, researched technology adoption with East African farmers, and developed Open Innovation and partnership design tools used worldwide. Bart teaches entrepreneurship at the University Of Wageningen, the world's leader in agriculture technology.