When Good Ideas Get Lost in Translation

In my recent journey to jumpstart my career and find my footing in a new market and ecosystem, I have found myself asking a question that feels both personal and familiar: how do I make my work travel with me while remaining relevant, impactful and valuable?

Do geographical boundaries, culture, people, and context affect how ideas are received? Through my experience and studies in strategic communications, I have learnt that “resonance is never imported”. So, what happens when an expert or idea crosses a border? Does it need to change to find relevance in a new context, and if so, what do we gain or lose in the process?

These are questions I have also found myself asking when thinking about some of the startups and innovators I have had the privilege of working with, particularly those with great ideas who are trying to make themselves seen and heard. Perhaps the challenge is not simply getting a good idea noticed. It is helping that idea travel, find the right context, and create value beyond where it began.

There is a familiar way of talking about African innovation. We talk about ingenuity. Resilience. The ability to build solutions around constraints. All of these things are true. But I think there is a more interesting question: What happens when those ideas travel?

Not simply when an African business enters another market, but when a solution developed in one context meets a completely different ecosystem, set of assumptions or way of working. That is where things can get interesting.

A solution built to solve a very specific challenge in Nairobi may prompt a different question in London. A model developed around limited resources may offer an unexpected lesson to an organisation operating with considerably more infrastructure. An approach that works because it is deeply rooted in the community may challenge how another market thinks about scale.

The idea does not necessarily arrive somewhere else unchanged. And perhaps sometimes it shouldn't. The value can be in what happens when it is tested, questioned, adapted and built upon. This is one reason I have become increasingly interested in the role of platforms and the ecosystems around innovation.

A platform should do more than give an innovator somewhere to tell their story. It should help create the conditions for useful encounters. The right conversation with a potential partner. A connection to someone facing a similar problem in a completely different context. Access to knowledge that changes how a product or service is developed. A question from another market that makes an innovator rethink an assumption they had taken for granted. Sometimes the most valuable outcome is not the immediate opportunity. It is the exchange of perspective.

This also changes how we think about collaboration between Africa and the rest of the world. There is a tendency for these conversations to be framed around what can be brought into Africa: expertise, investment, technology or established models.

But there is another direction of travel that deserves just as much attention. What can travel out? What approaches developed in African markets could influence how organisations elsewhere think about access, affordability, community engagement, technology or service delivery?

And what might happen when those ideas meet people who can help adapt them for a different context? Of course, moving an idea between markets is rarely as simple as copying and pasting. Context matters.

What works in one place may need to be redesigned somewhere else. Regulations, culture, infrastructure, customer behaviour and access to capital can all change the equation. That is why the most useful platforms are not simply focused on visibility.

They create opportunities for people to learn from one another. They make it easier to ask better questions. They create space for experimentation. And they allow the innovators themselves to shape the conversation rather than simply being presented as examples of innovation.

That, for me, is where building for impact becomes more interesting. The goal is not to build a bigger showcase. It is to build something that helps good ideas move, evolve and become useful in new places.

As technology makes it easier for people and businesses to connect across borders, I think we will see more of this exchange. The opportunity is not simply to ask, What is being built in Africa? It is to ask: What can the rest of us learn from it, and how can we integrate for better outcomes?

And perhaps even more importantly: What could we build together that none of us would have built alone?