The physician-turned-innovation strategist has just concluded Nigeria’s most structured oil and gas technology competition – and he is only getting started.
The room was charged with anticipation as innovators, engineers, industry leaders and policymakers gathered at the NCDMB Tower in Yenagoa.
But beyond the applause, the pitches and the prize announcements, one question lingered: what happens when Nigeria’s brightest ideas finally get the structure they need to become businesses?
On August 12, 2026, the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board (NCDMB) Tower in Yenagoa, Bayelsa State, became a meeting point for some of the country’s most promising young innovators and professionals as the Tech-Innovation Challenge (TIC) 2026 reached its climax.
More than a hundred innovators, engineers, scientists, oil and gas executives and government officials had gathered for what was more than another technology competition. TIC 2026 was designed as a structured journey. From ideas to mentorship, from mentorship to development, and ultimately from development to commercial possibility.
At the centre of that journey was a man who took more than 100 applicants and built the structured development system that turned them into competition-ready, commercially viable innovators through mentorship, training, bootcamp, and rigorous judging. He Obichi Obiajunwa, Executive Director of Hutzpa Centre for Innovation and Development and Project Manager of TIC 2026.
For someone whose professional foundation began in medicine, Obiajunwa’s journey into innovation is an intriguing one. He holds degrees in Medicine and Surgery, Public Health, Business Administration and a PhD. But perhaps the more interesting story is not the number of qualifications attached to his name; it is the way he has combined them to tackle problems far beyond the walls of a hospital.
Obichi Obiajunwa has spent the past four months building something that is rare in the Nigeria’s oil and gas sector: a rigorous, end-to-end research to commercialization innovation pipeline that takes original research from across the country and develops them into commercially viable, investor-ready, operator-facing technology solutions.
‘Nigeria does not have a shortage of brilliant minds. What it has had is a shortage of structured pathways to turn those minds into market solutions. The TIC was designed to be that pathway – not just a competition, but a development system. What we built here is a model that can be replicated across every sector of Nigeria’s economy.
– Obichi Obiajunwa, Innovation Strategist and Programme Director, TIC 2026
The numbers behind the TIC 2026 are striking. More than 100 applications were received from innovators across Nigeria’s six geopolitical zones. Thirty teams were selected to pitch online. Fifteen finalists were put through a twenty-three-hour lecture curriculum, sixty-three hours of one-on-one mentorship with some of Nigeria’s most experienced technology and business minds, and a five-day intensive physical bootcamp at NCDMB Tower.
They emerged from that process as measurably different innovators – more commercially aware, more financially literate, more capable of articulating their value proposition to an operator or an investor.
The three innovations that ultimately claimed the prizes on 12 August represent the depth of what was surfaced through this process. GeoPredict AI, the first-prize winner, uses artificial intelligence to interpret well logs for Nigerian independent operators – solving a problem that currently costs those operators significant amounts in foreign software licences and expatriate petrophysicist fees.
FrassPlus, which claimed the second prize, uses Black Soldier Fly Larvae to bioremediate crude oil spills in-situ, achieving an 84 percent reduction in total petroleum hydrocarbons within twenty-one days, at 60 percent lower cost than conventional methods.
The third prize went to a team developing an organic battery using locally sourced materials and a sodium-ion composite electrolyte – a genuine advance in indigenous energy storage technology.
None of these innovations existed in their current commercial and market-readiness forms before TIC. All of them were developed, refined, financially modelled, and commercially stress-tested under the programme.
‘My background in medicine taught me how to diagnose, treat, and prevent. My work in innovation has the same logic: diagnose what is missing in an ecosystem, design the intervention, and build it with enough rigour that it actually works. Nigeria’s innovation ecosystem needed structure, evidence, and accountability. That is what we brought to TIC,’ Obichi Obiajunwa stated.
What makes Obiajunwa’s contribution to this programme particularly significant is not merely that he managed it. He also mentored within it – working directly with finalist teams on their financial models, their IP strategies, their technology readiness assessments, and their pitch preparation.
He was simultaneously the architect and the builder; the programme manager and the practitioner. That dual role reflects the model of leadership he has consistently embodied across his career: one that combines systemic thinking with hands-on delivery.
Beyond the TIC, Obiajunwa leads Hutzpa Centre for Innovation and Development, an organisation that operates at the intersection of innovation management, capacity development, and venture creation across Nigeria and the African continent.
He is also Founding Partner and Chief Strategy and Growth Officer at Hutzpa Innovations, Founder of the Young Innovation Leaders (YIL) Fellowship, an adjunct lecturer of Healthcare Innovation at the University of Port Harcourt, and holds a leadership role with the Global Innovation Institute (GInI) Nigeria Chapter.
Together, these roles reflect a practitioner who does not specialize in one narrow domain but operates across the full spectrum of what it takes to build functioning, sustainable systems – in healthcare, in technology, in business, and in public institutions.
The top ten finalists of TIC 2026 now qualify for EICL’s post-competition incubation programme – a structured, ongoing development pathway that will continue the work of moving their innovations from competition readiness to commercial deployment.
Obiajunwa will continue to play a central role in that process. For him, the end of the competition is not the end of the work.
‘The prize ceremony is a moment. The incubation is the mission. We are not done with these innovators, and they are not done with Nigeria,’ Obiajunwa stated.
Obichi Obiajunwa is an Innovation Strategist, Programme Director, and multi-disciplinary leader working at the intersection of technology, health systems, business strategy, and public institutions. He is the Executive Director of Hutzpa Centre for Innovation and Development; Founding Partner and Chief Strategy and Growth Officer at RiskStory Technologies Ltd; CEO of Theragist; and a chapter leader with the Global Innovation Institute (GInI) Nigeria. He served as Project Manager of the TIC 2026, Nigeria’s most comprehensive structured innovation programme for the oil and gas sector, designed and delivered on behalf of NCDMB by Entrepreneurship and Innovation Centre Ltd (EICL). He works across Nigeria and the African continent on innovation management, capacity development, data protection compliance, and the design of programmes that connect talent to markets.