Linking Entrepreneurial Innovations from Kenyan Universities to Kenyan Market Through Private Venture Capital Financing

Abstract

Innovation is the process of Entrepreneurship. Companies cannot grow through cost reduction and re-engineering alone. Innovation is the key element in providing aggressive top-line growth and for increasing bottom line results. Universities play an important role as a source of fundamental knowledge and occasionally industrially relevant technology in modern based economies. Financial inaccessibility has been sighted as a major challenge on the growth of small enterprises. Despite the importance of innovations, many innovations go down the drain as the young innovators are unable to take their innovations to the market due to lack of finances. This study seeks to shade light on the existence of private venture capitalist (VC) who is willing to risk with the young entrepreneurs to facilitate market for their innovations. As Universities seek to encourage students to being more of job creators as opposed to job seekers, it’s important to shade light on the existence of venture capitalist who come in not as passive investors but active investors willing to risk with the young entrepreneurs. The traditional financial institutions are unwilling to fund young innovations and consider them as risk averse and notwithstanding the fact that many do not have collateral which is a prerequisite for traditional financial institution lending. The study seeks on importance of embracing private venture capitalist as an alternative of funding young innovation in pursuit of mitigating this deep rooted challenge.