Venture capitalists are always looking for small college ideas to put their money in. In a way they nurture and support the growth of these ideas that improve society lifestyle. This was pointed out on the final day of the innovation week held in Strathmore University where entrepreneurs, ICT innovators and students had gathered.

As many innovators step up to provide business solutions, emphasis was made on the relevance of their ideas especially to the Kenyan and African market as a whole. Mr. Agosta Liko, founder and CEO of VARIANT pointed out to online financial services such as ‘PesaPal’ and how they are relevant to the society in terms of convenience they provide especially on reduced time and money spent in processing transactions, reducing business operating costs and offering appropriate receipting?

Agosti added that, solutions that integrate services like mobile wallets, banks and credit cards should be able to allow interoperability between various providers to maximise on efficiency.

Mr. Muchiri Nyaggah, the principle partner of Semacraft enforced the importance of marketing ICT innovations as a means of reaching out to external markets. “Upcoming developers should design products with a human centered approach, they should put the markets in mind," says Muchiri. He shared about the relevance and importance an ICT innovation is to society.

Young developers were also challenged to explore open source software developments tools. Open source software is readily available and can be to modified with ease. As solution developers, there is an emerging need for group projects as developers stand to gain a lot of exposure through working collaborativelly.

Walter Mhlongo, the client solution executive for IBM East Africa demonstrated various cloud computing solutions offered by IBM. He also gave examples of how cloud computing provides numerous advantages in terms of collaborative working and monitoring operational process in an organization.

Mhlongo saw the need to utilize IT infrastructure to the fullest. For instance, the university servers are usually idle during the holidays when students break, why can’t these institutions venture in the “cloud” business and use facilities in the cloud when they need to? Students were made aware of available student partnership activities with IBM and encouraged to pursue them as an important opportunity in their career development process.

Vincent Nyaga, Microsoft platform development manager, talked about the “Imagine cup”, a world's premier student technology competition hosted by Microsoft. It is opened to high school, college, and university students aimed at using technology to help achieve UN Millennium development goals. The competitors have to come up with programs for the following categories; software design, embedded development, game design and digital media.

The innovation week provided a forum through which developers showcased their projects. The projects ranged from ICT based data collection systems for tapped Solar Energy to mobile e-commerce systems to handle business transactions.

Kenya is full of young minds with creative ideas, a generation where everyone wants to come up with his/her own project. Therefore there is a need to draw a line on what to purse depending on their level of creativity and benefits.