Who Gains Most from Innovation Training? Experience, Gender, and Team Diversity in a Product Development Workshop in Africa
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.65655/8c1vcw97Keywords:
innovation training, customer discovery, absorptive capacity, team diversity, gender inclusion, entrepreneurship education, African innovation ecosystemsAbstract
Purpose: Short-format innovation workshops are proliferating across African startup ecosystems, yet it remains unclear who benefits most and which product-development capabilities can meaningfully improve in a few days. This study tests how prior product-development experience, gender, and team diversity shape domain-specific learning gains in intensive innovation training. Design/methodology/approach: We analyze original pre–post survey data from a five-day, team-based product innovation workshop hosted by Carnegie Mellon University Africa’s Industry Innovation Lab in Kigali. The cohort comprised 45 participants from 12 African countries (51% women), purposively assigned to teams designed for gender–nationality variety. Participants rated confidence (1–10) in three domains central to early-stage product work: customer discovery, value opportunity analysis (VOA), and prototyping. Ordinary least squares models estimated average and domain-specific gains while accounting for baseline skill. Findings: Average gain across domains was 1.97 points. Prior product-development experience significantly predicted higher overall gains (β = 0.259, p = 0.032) and showed the strongest domain effect in customer discovery (β = 0.498, p < 0.05). Baseline skill was negatively associated with gains (β ≈ −0.20, p < 0.001), indicating ceiling effects in accelerated formats. Gender and the team diversity index exhibited no significant main effects. The experience × gender interaction was not statistically significant, but its direction suggests potential vulnerability for inexperienced women that warrants targeted instructional scaffolding. Originality/value: The study provides field evidence from a multi-country African cohort, disaggregates innovation learning into distinct product-development domains, and clarifies why demographic variety may remain inert without activation mechanisms. For ecosystem builders and entrepreneurship educators, results support differentiating scaffolds for novices, embedding explicit knowledge-integration and equitable-participation routines to activate diversity, and pairing short workshops with follow-on support for VOA and prototyping.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Dr. Stanley Mukasa, Dennis Ngobi, Dr. Sixbert Sangwa (Author)
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