Unlocking the Potential of Non-Fungible Tokens: Exploring the Benefits of NFTs at Ashesi University
The Ashesi D:Lab under the auspices of the Ashesi Entrepreneurship Center organised an exciting session on the emergence of digital assets such as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and cryptocurrencies on Friday, 23rd September 2022. The event, clad with enthusiasm and exciting engagements from faculty, staff and students, drew research-based insights from data collected by the student researchers over the summer and forged next steps for designing and building digital assets to be used by members of the Ashesi community. The NFT session at Ashesi was an eye-opening experience! Students from various backgrounds gathered to learn the fundamentals of blockchain technology, exploring the potential of NFTs and the exciting possibilities they offer.
The Ashesi D:Lab is a unit of the Ashesi Entrepreneurship Center (AEC) poised to facilitate innovation through design thinking and design building. Beyond engaging students, faculty, and staff to build innovations in conventional sectors such as agriculture, education, health, among others, it also focuses on getting them interested in tapping into emerging technologies that come to set new trends to socio-economic activities. As a key contributor in the Ashesi entrepreneurship ecosystem, the D:Lab carefully designs its projects to explore creation of processes, products or services which have value-creating potential and able to meet real-life needs. It continually projects to meet an Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) as its project is aligned with the SDG 9 which seeks to enhance industry, innovation and infrastructure by 2030. The project is also highly linked to the second goal of African Union’s Agenda 2063, which aims at educating students with improved skills that are underpinned by science, technology and innovation. These goal pushed the Ashesi D:Lab to supervise a team of students, led by Mr. Jason Nkansah, to conduct some data collection and analysis on the use and emergence of digital assets such as NFTs among Ashesi students.
The objective of this session was to set the platform and open up conversations around the radical emergence of digital assets, and the gainful potential opportunities it could bring to the Ashesi community. In attendance were the Ashesi Student Council president, Mr. Adomakoh and his vice, Mr. Azumah, who summed up the student’s voice in appreciation of the Ashesi D:Lab‘s initiative to expose more students to the opportunities within the NFT space. The Block Club president, Mr Elias, who was also present, highlighted the importance of holding and trading digital assets, and how Africa can capitalise on the NFT wave to reap immense socio-economic gains.
Students analyzing data from an NFT survey conducted during the summer
Recap of the Session
The event began by introducing some stakeholders in the NFT project including a London based digital asset expert, Ms. Shirley Nzeh (Founder of Web3.0 Africa), who spoke extensively on how Web3 serves as an opportunity to surmount the challenges in the African continent. This was followed by a presentation titled, Digital Assets and their Impact on the Ashesi Community. The project team of, Jason Nkansah, Ewurabena Zwennes, Pascal Mathias and Ohenewaa explained the rationale behind going into digital assets in this presentation, as well as some outcomes of the ethnographic research that they had done. They highlighted as part of their findings, the misconceptions some Ashesi community members had concerning digital assets, some opportunity areas for innovation, and recommended next steps.
A student presenting analysis using a BMC from the break-out groups
The main activity of the event was sense-making of the data the team members had collected from ethnographic research. The various teams formed used #designthinking analysis tools like empathy maps, journey maps, a 2x2 matrix, and a business model canvas (BMC) to visualize essential details of the research data.
In all, the NFT event was a resounding success that informed attendants of the benefits of digital assets and served as an insightful space for the progression of the project. Attendants reacted positively to the event. They shared some of the insights and lessons and expressed their excitement about the opportunity to be part of a project in the digital asset space. To close the day off, the D:Lab hosted an Ashesi alumni, Mr Dela Acolatse who is a chef consultant specialised in highlighting the usefulness of local ingredients in contemporary dishes with origins from different parts of Africa and the globe. He served attendees with his exotic one-biters, and a lavish 3 course dinner experience for team members of the high performing teams from the D:lab Innovation Expo.
D: Lab Innovation Expo winners having dinner with Dela Acolatse