AFRICAN HEROES NETWORK INTERNATIONAL: Heroz Afriq Magazine

AFRICAN HEROES NETWORK INTERNATIONAL: Heroz Afriq Magazine: "This is one in a kind information, career and lifestyle magazine for young minds. We wish to bring to your door step the great secret ad im..."

Heroz Afriq Magazine

This is one in a kind information, career and lifestyle magazine for young minds. We wish to bring to your door step the great secret ad importance of information. IT is a must read.
Heroz Afriq is a publication of African Heroz Network International, a youth club with the immense intense of creating a lasting knowledge about the actual sense of living and the way foreword towards career selection. The road also leads to the great youth achievement and turning the youths into great Heroes of a life time with a mandate to change the life of some one now.

Share the life story

Kris Appel never fit the stereotypical entrepreneur image of a geek in a computer lab. With a master's degree in romance language linguistics, she was recruited by the National Security Agency where she started as a translator and eventually settled into management for 17 years. She says she enjoyed her career but felt something was missing because it "wasn't creative."

After a couple of years at a tech company, in 2006 Kris signed up for a yearlong program which "changed my life by giving me tools, training and the nerve to unleash my creativity." Launched in 2005 at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, the program called ACTiVATE, is designed for mid-career professional women who have a desire to build technology companies. Funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, the program helps budding entrepreneurial women develop and test business ideas by exploring potential technology transfers -- intellectual property sitting in university and government labs -- waiting to be commercialized. The program pushes teams to license technologies, hire teams, raise capital, launch products, merge and grow companies. Kris decided to stay close to her Baltimore home and found her tech passion nearby in the labs of the University of Maryland School of Medicine: two women professors in physical rehabilitation, Dr. Jill Whithall and Dr. Sandy McCombe Waller, had invented an exercise device to help improve arm function and range of motion in people with partial paralysis caused by stroke, cerebral palsy or other brain injuries.

After talking to patients whose lives have been improved by the device, Kris became impassioned about the potential of the product and licensed exclusive worldwide rights to the technology for 20 years. The company Kris launched in 2006 is Encore Path and her signature product is Tailwind, a mechanical exercise device that helps stroke survivors recover arm movement by reactivating central neuromuscular pathways through repetitive therapy. With the two inventors on her Advisory Board, Encore Path now has about 18 employees and has sold over 100 devices. About 70% of sales are directly to stroke patients for home use through her website: about 20% go to hospitals for use in rehabilitation centers and 10% to overseas distributors. Her pride is that despite a money back guarantee, no one has ever returned the device; instead her energy is fueled by testimonials from stroke patients who have regained arm function with the device. With six million Americans living with the physical impairments of stroke, Kris is confident her product has strong potential as she shores up her marketing. Her current challenge is to build sales volume with a boost from another round of financing her hopes to secure in the fall.

Meanwhile the ACTiVATE program where she got her start has also moved west. Director Julie Lenzer Kirk, a former IBM employee and software entrepreneur who cashed out and now heads the Maryland program is proud of the 100 women she has trained to start their own businesses. While the graduates have already created more than two dozen technology companies, she thinks, "that isn't enough." So she is spurring the expansion of the program in other states. The first outpost is Texas State, at the Round Rock campus, just north of Austin which started a program last fall with a class of 26 women culled from over 100 applicants. The director of the Texas State program is former biotech entrepreneur, Terry Hazell, an instructor who worked in the Maryland program. Funded by Texas State University, the program insures its students meet with representatives from universities throughout Texas who bring in technologies ready for market. So far, Texas ACTiVATE has spun off six new companies and is working with three program participants to use technologies to expand existing companies. Eventually, the universities get royalties from the sale of their products.

Now ACTiVATE is also poised for international expansion. In 2008, Julie Lenzer Kirk, along with Renee Lewis who joined the program in 2008, was asked by the State Department to provide four months of training to a group of women entrepreneurs in South Africa. They have since presented similar programs in Qatar. As a result earlier this year, the pair has secured the international license to ACTiVATE to promote professional growth and development for women around the world.

High tech holds unlimited opportunity for entrepreneurs at any age. For starters, all universities have gems ready to become the basis for start-ups. Of course the path is typically winding, even treacherous! In future blogs we'll explore more on retooling for women, tech transfer opportunities, problems in securing patents, forging reasonable licensing and royalty agreements, and the challenges of regulatory approvals. The key, urges ACTiVATE architect Julie Lenzer Kirk, is to push women past their comfort zone. In an early class, she says, "I ask women to put their watches on the other arm; it drives those nuts. But I tell them to get used to it. You have to learn to be uncomfortable to be a successful entrepreneur."

Choosing a career II

Topic: CHOOSING A CAREER II



Last time, I discussed this topic introducing career and most importantly for those who where with me on this column in the last edition, I promised to get into details using a particular skill as key note. That I haven’t forgotten but before I commence, I want to believe that for those of you who were opportuned to lay your hands on the last edition of this paper, where my first article was published, I want to rather believe you where able to understand the great importance not with fear and not minding the risk involved in choosing a career. We have actually tackled the issue of what to do and how to get started. Right in this article, I shall be discussing how to turn your business skills and hobby into life time career.

I want to recall what I said earlier in my first publication. For those of you who came across the last write-up I did on this same issue, you will remember I made a statement in the second paragraph, where I said “So many young people desire to be professionals in their different areas of specialisation, such as doctors, lawyers, Engineers and so on”

Now what I want you to understand is that professionalism does not lie only in these areas specified above. No particular specialisation was made more important than the other, do not be deceived. Every field of specialisation is as important as you handle it. Do not think its just that man or woman with an Engineering certificate, that with a degree in Medicine or that person with LLB in Law, should be the best professional order than those with mastery in the theoretical and the practical of their works. I want to thank God almighty for using the president Dr. Good luck Jonathan to sign the Nigerian content Act into Law which states that no company must engage expert rates in carrying out activities in the country. Yes that is good enough and that means we shall soon flee from unemployment. That is very much beautiful but I am sorry to say that these youth will still remain unemployed with the condition attached, meaning that all graduates must be properly tutored and skilled in their areas of your specialty if they must find a place in the various sector of the organisations. This means that as an Engineer you are been appreciated for what you can do and not what you think you know because what you think you know cannot get the job done. To crown it all, it has also been stated by the institute of engineers that one who thinks he is a professional in Engineering must at least have eight years experience before he/she will be seen as one. Only then can they be certified fit to carry out jobs effectively. How do you now compare that fresh graduate, without a single knowledge of what Engineering tool is all about without that man who was never a graduate but knows much about the technicality involved in engineering matters? Please do not misquote me. I am not in any way insinuating that education is not good, neither am I saying that been a graduate is a bad thing. No! All I am saying is that as a technical man, you have better advantage with education but very dangerous when you believe just theoretical education is just the best bet, you are be getting it all wrong.

Talking about turning your profession into a likeable career, you need to first of all put value in that which you do, see it the same way you see the banking sector, the same way you see the oil companies and every other company that matters most to you in which you feel is full of milk and honey. No matter how small that business is, I will urge you to see it as one of the best in the whole world and by that, you begin to add value to that business of yours and by adding values, you are beginning to develop interest and with the interest you develop, success has no choice but to come your way.

Aliko Dangote got his breakthrough when he had the licence to import cement but before then, he never had the believe that cement could be that lucrative or rather he saw a gap and was able to fill in the gap. Meanwhile before then, people have been doing cement business. That is the value I am talking about. He added value to the business and today, you and I have a way of adding to his account by purchasing one or two of his products and that has made him one of the richest men in Nigeria if not in Africa. That alone made his business so exceptional. He was never a graduate.

Bill gate the world richest man, dropped out of school, added value to his skills and today the whole world talks of him. He too was never a graduate. I deplore you to go into the life history of most great men and woman of the world, then you will understand perfectly well that it is not about what you think or know but what you can do.

Most importantly, every one today uses face book and we all enjoy it. But that is some ones initiative and the idea of a drop out. You see one unique thing about all these persons, is the fact that they all added value to what they taught they can do better in and to the ideas in which they concealed. They simply saw the value in their skills and today they are much better than that man who thinks his first class will earn him the world. Even the bible made us to understand that the work of our hands shall make a way for us and also the man without work, should not eat. you see it is just a simple logic and principle even from the world largest book of wisdom, “the bible”. Like I always tell those that cares to listen, we don’t know how to go to school, we think going to school and barging certificates is the most important thing. We think it is all about going to gather certificate. No! It is not. Infarct the irony of it all is that the situation require you to get the whole certificate you can get but at the end, you still don’t get that job you so desire because you do not have the required skill to carry out the task meaning that you still have to learn on the job. Meanwhile no company is ready to engage you under training process. They have no time any more. Now as an employer, would you rather employ someone you will have to teach instead of one who already knows the job? That’s the reason today, you hear them say “with two or three years work experience”. You can go through a training school and still been rated higher than those who are acclaimed university graduates, this is because what you have to offer is much more than that which he /she from the university has to offer. No body wants to know the grade in which you graduated with. I know of some one with a second class upper but still looking for a job but that person with a third class has already secured a place for himself in a industry. It is about what he knows how best to do. I have seen a diploma holder putting a degree holder through in an office, what then would you say about that?

Back to choosing your career, I believe you now have a better understanding that every thing you do in life is a career if only you decide to make it one. No one ever believed that photography can ever make a good career, not even me not until I saw someone put value into it then I realised the great importance, added value to it and today I will say the sky has always been my limit and as a media person, I have been able to find myself a place in the media industry. Even though I don’t want to work as a writer, I can tell stories using photography and at same time do an independent thing. Now it is what I have that I will offer. With all this skills, you don’t expect a fresh graduate to displace me in an office where the both of us are needed. I was able to realise what I needed to do very much on time and today I have everything going for me. This can happen to anyone, all that makes the difference is been able to realise it and act on it.

In a nutshell, all I have succeeded in saying for the past few minute is that it’s just the fact that been seen or called a professional, lies in the ability of what you can offer, do and give for people to identify within the nearest future and not what you think you know by mere reading and cramming. By adding value to that profession, it turns out t be a career that even others will emulate and remember you for. Any thing is just possible if only you can think it and by thinking it, you need to put it into action. That way, the sky will be your starting point and not even your limit.