Transforming our food systems will require changing our innovation systems, in which organisations on agricultural research and innovation can play a crucial role. Key success factors for change can be organised into three dimensions: designing and managing transformative innovations, culture and structures of innovation organisations, and their engagement with the wider innovation ecosystem. Failures are crucial elements of innovation processes. Rapidly testing, sharing, building on, and learning from successful, and failed, innovations are key. This connects to the paradigm ‘Open Innovation 2.0’, which is widely applied in the private sector but not yet applied and evaluated for research and innovation organisations in the public sector or tertiary education. Four key principles emerge, namely big-picture action-oriented thinking, entrepreneurial organisational culture, close attention to partnerships and contexts, and diverse investment portfolios, with different levels of risk. These also imply—and require—the upstream transformation of funding and incentive systems.

The pace of urbanisation across sub-Saharan Africa over the last 60 years is without precedence. In 1950, most African countries were agrarian societies and just over a quarter of the population lived in cities. By 2020, the continent had 74 cities with a population of more than one million people, equivalent to the US and Europe combined. Today almost half of sub-Saharan Africans are urban dwellers and by 2050 that number is projected to reach 60 per cent. That means two- thirds of the continent’s projected population growth over the next three decades – an additional 950 million people – will be absorbed by the region’s humming, thriving, bustling megacities. And, as the OECD notes, ‘this transition is profoundly transforming the social, economic and political geography of the continent.’ Lagos, with a population of more than 20 million and economy bigger than that of Kenya is a vast, energetic and flourishing metropolis, a centre of opportunity that is enabling young Nigerians to be wealthier, more open-minded and more cosmopolitan than any before it.

The pace of urbanisation across sub-Saharan Africa over the last 60 years is without precedence. In 1950, most African countries were agrarian societies and just over a quarter of the population lived in cities. By 2020, the continent had 74 cities with a population of more than one million people, equivalent to the US and Europe combined. Today almost half of sub-Saharan Africans are urban dwellers and by 2050 that number is projected to reach 60 per cent. That means two- thirds of the continent’s projected population growth over the next three decades – an additional 950 million people – will be absorbed by the region’s humming, thriving, bustling megacities. And, as the OECD notes, ‘this transition is profoundly transforming the social, economic and political geography of the continent.’ Lagos, with a population of more than 20 million and economy bigger than that of Kenya is a vast, energetic and flourishing metropolis, a centre of opportunity that is enabling young Nigerians to be wealthier, more open-minded and more cosmopolitan than any before it.

Nigeria ranks first in the world in youthful entrepreneurship, with 40 per cent of young Nigerians engaged in early-stage entrepreneurial activity. With jobs scarce and often badly paid, a business on the side helps make ends meet. But it’s also a cultural attitude: entrepreneurial nous flows through this generation’s veins. New businesses tend to be focused on local and pan-African consumers and entrepreneurship is fuelled by social media. Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook are used as tools to sell physical products and services. Social enterprises are growing, too, as acting with humanity becomes an important consideration for many young entrepreneurs across the continent. The typical Soro Soke generation entrepreneur is a creative disruptor, using their business to deliver solutions to the larger problems the continent faces. But being an entrepreneur on the continent still poses significant challenges. Nigeria has the highest volume of start-ups on the African continent, over 750, but misses out on all the top 10 rankings for categories that are critical to helping a business thrive.

Nigeria ranks first in the world in youthful entrepreneurship, with 40 per cent of young Nigerians engaged in early-stage entrepreneurial activity. With jobs scarce and often badly paid, a business on the side helps make ends meet. But it’s also a cultural attitude: entrepreneurial nous flows through this generation’s veins. New businesses tend to be focused on local and pan-African consumers and entrepreneurship is fuelled by social media. Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook are used as tools to sell physical products and services. Social enterprises are growing, too, as acting with humanity becomes an important consideration for many young entrepreneurs across the continent. The typical Soro Soke generation entrepreneur is a creative disruptor, using their business to deliver solutions to the larger problems the continent faces. But being an entrepreneur on the continent still poses significant challenges. Nigeria has the highest volume of start-ups on the African continent, over 750, but misses out on all the top 10 rankings for categories that are critical to helping a business thrive.

Chapter 2 examines how informants, writers, and editors reconciled tensions in the party-state’s socialist, market reform, and nationalist discourses through reinterpreting the historical landscape of the northeast borderland. The northeast borderland's history of migration, colonialism, cross-border trade, and ethnic conflict provided a flexible tableau for reconciling aspects of post-Mao reform ideology. Drawing on entangled historical themes of competing states, colonialism, migration, and commerce, participants in the project integrated nationalist victimization narratives with celebrations of Chinese entrepreneurial achievement and commercial expansion that complemented and corroborated the Party’s political rehabilitation of persecuted elites. Wenshi ziliao writers and editors intervened in this potentially problematic colonial and extra-national past to redefine Party socialism in nationalist and regionalist terms of the northeast borderland’s becoming Chinese. This involved a collusion of informants with the editors and Party officials sponsoring the project, as former migrant entrepreneurs manipulated the flexible discursive landscape to weave together and make sense of their stories of personal life failures and successes. The northeast borderland as reappropriated past is tied to the story of the reconfiguration of the post-Mao state.