On April 30, 2025, Zainab Suleiman from APODISSI attended the Research and Innovation to Commercialisation Workshop. The workshop was organised live in Lagos, Nigeria, by the Impact Investors Foundation and hosted by the Nigerian Impact Investing Research Industry Collaborative (NIIRIC).
The event offered valuable learning and networking opportunities, equipping participants with practical tools and insights to transform research and innovative ideas into scalable commercial ventures. Kingsley Godwin introduced the esteemed guest speakers: Dr. Patrick Oghuma, Special Adviser to the Minister on Technical Administration, and Oreva Atanya, Director of the Lagos Business School Sustainability Center. He emphasised that by the end of the training, all participants would have a commercialisation roadmap for their research.
During the first session on Understanding Research Commercialisation, Prince Ogbonna, CEO of Moolu Ventures Lab, noted that the market consists of people’s pain points. He explained that design thinking serves as a roadmap to success and emphasised the importance of discovering the “problem ecosystem” to understand the journey from research and innovation to commercialisation.
In a discussion with Dr Itoro Emembolu, following a rigorous group session on Intellectual Property, Market Fit, and Business Models, she identified a lack of understanding of technology and market readiness as one of the challenges faced by Nigerian researchers in commercialisation.
The session concluded with the development of a Commercialisation Roadmap, during which participants formulated effective research-to-market strategies to demonstrate their understanding of the training.
