I am Selorm Tamakloe, a socio-technological researcher exploring the trajectory sequences that innovators and entrepreneurs in low-middle income contexts motion through to arrive at the creation of impactful problem-solving ventures. I conduct my research employing elements of the Lean Research Framework, ensuring that the research process is respectful and relevant to the research subjects while maintaining the rigour needed to ensure that the outcomes are of high quality.

With the permission of the research subjects, I share their stories on my Medium page to inform potential collaborators, investors and researchers about the innovation ecosystem within the West African subregion. Prospective entrepreneurs, as well as contemporaries of the entrepreneurs I interview, find informative guidelines and inspiration from reading these stories, positioning them to be more refined in their decision-making processes.

The big picture is to create a repository of documented West African entrepreneurial and innovation journeys, told by West Africans, for West Africans and anyone else who is genuinely interested in learning about the West African innovation ecosystem.

9 out of the 16 geopolitical states within the sub-region are Francophone, and my French-speaking abilities are at the intermediate level, which can go just a mile into the depths of the conversations that need to be documented from the region’s French-speaking innovators. I am looking for a bilingual (French and English) collaborator on this project, who is interested in innovation research for the West African sub-region. If you are the one, kindly reach out and let us have a conversation.

This project goes beyond a single individual. I will at a point migrate the ever-expanding repository to a different domain, dedicated only to capturing these stories, generating visualised data analyses of the datasets and suggesting prototypes of models and policies that could be implemented to engender innovation in low-middle income countries, specifically within the West African sub-region.

My email is selorm[dot]k[dot]tamakloe[at]gmail[dot]com. You can find me on LinkedIn here, and Twitter here.