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1. Introduction

It is now abundantly apparent that for countries to be integrated into and competitive within the global arena, they have to adapt to the rules of competition that are consistent with globalization: a phenomenon that has become an ineluctable process, whose challenges can be neglected only at the expense of the wealth of nations (Tchamyou, 2014; Asongu, 2015a). Competition in the twenty-first century is fundamentally centred on knowledge economy (KE). Unfortunately, recent evidence suggests that KE in the African continent has been decreasing since 2000 (Asongu, 2015b).

The 2014 African Economic Conference on “Knowledge and Innovation for Africa’s Transformation” has clearly articulated, inter alia, the imperative of investing in innovations and technology that are centred on people, for Africa’s development and the importance of KE in shaping Africa’s future. This is broadly consistent with the recent stream of research on entrepreneurship (Brixiova et al., 2015) and innovation (Oluwatobi et al., 2014) for the continent’s emergence from poverty (Kuada, 2011a) and stylized facts on doing business challenges on the continent (Ernst & Young, 2013; Leke et al., 2010). We discuss recent African KE and entrepreneurship literature motivating the present line of inquiry in three main strands:

  • need for entrepreneurship and investment;

  • business strategies for achieving sustainable progress; and

  • KE on the continent.

First, on entrepreneurship, in line with Tchamyou (2014), doing business in Africa is extremely risky (Alagidede, 2008; Asongu, 2012). Doing business indicators of the World Bank do not fully reflect the African situation in terms of the impact of labour regulation (Paul et al., 2010). This is in accordance with an earlier position by Eifert et al. (2008) that the performance of African firms is undervalued by these indicators. The study is based on 7,000 companies in 17 countries, with data for the period of 2002-2003. This finding does not overlook the current challenges of entrepreneurship in the continent (Taplin and Synman, 2004) which have culminated in, among others:

  • studies encouraging more entrepreneurial lessons in undergraduate university programmes (Gerba, 2012);

  • a growing body of work on female entrepreneurial motivation (Singh et al., 2011) to bridge the substantially documented gender gap in doing business (Kuada, 2009);

  • the fundamental roles of community and family relationships in the decision...

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