LONDON, United Kingdom (NPA) — The Special Adviser to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu on Media and Public Communications and presidential spokesperson, Mr Sunday Dare, has urged governments, private investors and start-ups to focus on building strong institutional and operational structures capable of supporting sustainable growth and global expansion.
Dare made the submission on Thursday, September 10, as the keynote speaker at the 2026 Investors Connect held at Imperial College London, United Kingdom.
The event was held under the theme, “Building for Global Scale: The Venture Architecture That Attracts Institutions and Funds.”
In a statement issued on Sunday, Dare shared key observations from his presentation, describing them as useful lessons for both government and operators in the private investment and start-up ecosystem.
He said scalability was not driven by ambition alone but depended on the structures and systems built around an idea, product or enterprise.
Among the key assertions from his presentation were:
- “Scale is not simply a function of ambition; it is a function of architecture.”
- “A good idea is not necessarily a scalable idea.”
- “Early success is not scale, and a successful pilot is not the same thing as impact at scale.”
- “Capital is indispensable to growth, but capital does not automatically create scalability. It accelerates what has already been designed and built to scale.”
- “Reach is not scale. What matters is whether that reach can be sustained, expanded and converted into trust, adoption and value.”
- “A good product is not enough, and the existence of a large potential market is not enough either.”
- “The real question is not simply whether the market exists, but whether you have built an enterprise capable of serving that market at scale.”
- “Scale does not always require building everything yourself. Sometimes it comes from bringing together capabilities, networks and strengths that already exist separately.”
- “The critical question may not simply be, ‘What more must I build?’ but also, ‘Who already has the market access, infrastructure, knowledge or capability that can help us scale faster?’”
- “An idea may begin with an individual, but if it is to achieve genuine scale, it must eventually become bigger than its originator.”
- “Demand does not produce scale by itself. There must be an architecture capable of converting demand into access, transactions and sustained growth.”
- “Government does not always have to be the entity doing the scaling. Sometimes its most consequential role is to create the conditions in which others can scale.”
- “Regulatory risk is investment risk.”
- “Global scale is not the ability to reproduce exactly the same model everywhere. It is the ability to preserve what makes your model valuable while adapting sufficiently to the economics, behaviour and institutions of each market.”
- “Population by itself is not an economic advantage. Demography becomes an advantage when people are equipped with the skills, opportunities and productive capacity to create value.”
- “The people architecture must be as scalable as the technology architecture.”
- “Institutional capital ultimately wants to invest in an institution, not permanent dependence on an individual.”
- “Activity is not impact, and pilot success is not population-level success.”
- “There is a fundamental difference between budgeting for an outcome and financing its delivery.”
- “The real test of an idea is not simply whether it works, but whether the architecture exists for it to work repeatedly, for many more people, under different market conditions, under greater pressure and complexity, and long after the individuals who first conceived it have moved on.”
Dare said the lessons were relevant to governments seeking to create enabling environments for businesses and investors looking for ventures capable of achieving sustainable growth beyond their initial markets.
He noted that successful ventures must develop structures that can withstand increasing demand, complexity and institutional expectations, rather than relying solely on the vision or capacity of their founders.
The presidential spokesperson also emphasised the importance of partnerships, regulatory stability, human capital and institutional capacity in creating enterprises capable of attracting long-term investment and achieving global scale.
