At least 40 participants comprising of professionals from the digital creative media industry, NGOs, and representatives from Kenya’s Ministry of Education, Science and Technology attended a policy forum organized by GESCI’s African Knowledge Exchange (AKE) programme. The forum dubbed Linking New Skills, Business Opportunity and Job Creation for Cultural Industry Development in Africa was held at the Sarova Stanley Hotel in Nairobi on 9 March 2015. One of the key objectives of the forum was to create a networking opportunity for attendees to facilitate future dialogue and collaboration. While reflecting on the question ‘what is innovation?’, participants investigated innovative opportunities for linking skills and business development to prepare and develop youth skills to participate in and create opportunities for employment in digital media cultural enterprises. “The youth should not confine themselves to their local market – the world should be their market place,” said Zambia’s BongoHive co-founder Simunza Muyangana. Expressing how the AKE model of training is responding to new frameworks that the education system needs to respond to encourage and sustain innovation, GESCI CEO Jerome Morrissey said, “Anticipatory leadership now needs to be the focus. We are not educating and training for the present – the curriculum in schools needs to be future-oriented in order to reflect and accommodate emerging skills-development models and which encourage digital and visual literacy, right from lower school level.” “The AKE is educating for the global scene, not just for the Kenyan market,” agrees GESCI’s Director of Programmes Patti Swarts. Aalto University’s Media Lab Living Lab has been conducting research on the AKE course to capture the emerging AKE technology-enhanced learning model that is linked to digital creative media industries. Findings from the research were presented at the forum, and participants invited to share their knowledge and experiences in regards to these findings covering key themes of innovation, content, local & global perspectives and sustainability. The African Knowledge Exchange (AKE) is a knowledge partnership established by GESCI and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Finland, to identify new technology-driven training scenarios that enable new skills development, which will facilitate employment and job creation in the emerging knowledge societies in Africa. The policy forum was the last event for this funding phase of the AKE project. “We managed to establish connections for future partnerships and collaboration opportunities,” concludes AKE Programme Manager Elaine Wacuka-Hurt.