Oyihoma Saleh

My research focuses on understanding how market-creating innovations transform complicated and expensive products into ones that are far more affordable and accessible, enabling many more people to buy and use them, and how, through this process, societies grow, create jobs, build institutions, and lay the foundations for broad-based prosperity.

I was first introduced to Professor Christensen’s work when he gave the opening keynote at the Harvard Business School Africa Business Club conference in 2016, where I was competing in the New Venture Competition in my final year as an undergraduate, already deep in the question of what it meant to build in Africa.

During his talk, he made the case that Africa’s development challenge was not a lack of resources but a lack of investment in the only type of innovation that generates reliable growth, market-creating innovation. But that raised a harder question: how do you build market-creating enterprises where systems are corrupt and broken? The insight he shared from Efosa reframed everything I thought I understood: entrepreneurs don’t need broken systems to be fixed. They need to build around them, and in doing so build the market itself. The idea stayed with me.

Three years later I read The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty. The book brought to life the full depth of that thinking with evidence, history, and the stories of entrepreneurs who had built markets where none existed before, and would go on to profoundly influence my work across consulting, venture building, and investing in African markets before ultimately bringing me to the Institute.

Today, my work at the Institute is driven by a deep curiosity about how market-creating innovations take root in the world’s most challenging contexts. The Institute gives me the rare privilege of pursuing that curiosity alongside colleagues who genuinely care about the work, about the people it is meant to serve, and about each other.

What draws me to this work above all else is the conviction that the right framework, in the right hands, can change what people believe is possible, and that change in belief is itself a precondition for prosperity.

Experience

• Innovation Consultant, Capgemini, Applied Innovation Exchange
• Founder, Kosava Digital Ventures
• Imperial College London, MSc Innovation, Entrepreneurship & Management