When people refer to Ibrahim Toure as a civil engineer, he cringes a little bit. While he is proud of his longtime professional background first as an urban transportation engineer and then as a water resources engineer and hydroinformatician who brought his technical skills to a variety of locations from Florida to West Africa, that’s not who he sees himself as now. He explains, “That was just the first step for me. It was the first building block in who I am today. It’s not a bad starting point, but it’s not solely what I am anymore. Today, I’m an independent consultant and strategic advisor.”
In fact, in December of 2019, Toure left his position as director of innovation and project development at BNETD in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, on the Ivory Coast to return to his own Washington, DC-based consulting firm, EQUANYM A.I. Just before he made the transition, he began a journey with MIT Sloan Executive Education, participating in the Global Executive Academy, which automatically helped him achieve his Executive Certificate in Management and Leadership and inspired him to pursue his Advanced Certificate for Executives in Management, Innovation, and Technology (ACE), which he completed in November of 2021.
“I wasn’t looking for technical education. I wanted to know how I could tap into my technical expertise and transfer that knowledge to a broader business context,” he recalls. “I needed to broaden my understanding of how to examine business problems and bring IT solutions to them.”
Course Correction
After completing the Global Executive Academy, Toure delved into a host of MIT Sloan courses that addressed everything from productivity and systems thinking to virtual management. Already a third of the way towards his ACE, he took on classes like Digital Business Strategy: Harnessing our Digital Future and Platform Strategy: Building and Thriving in a Vibrant Ecosystem. He also took Blockchain Technologies: Business Innovation and Application and Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Business Strategy, and he finished his ACE with Systemic Innovation of Products, Processes and Services.
"MIT is the biggest knowledge center that you can take advantage of. It will expand your confidence and confirm the fundamental knowledge that you have. It also will establish your credibility with clients."
Collectively, the courses gave him the tools he needed to be able to look at clients’ technical challenges and explain how those tech-based problems are actually more complex business ones that are rooted in other issues that need to be solved first. Toure was able to develop his own roadmap for navigating conversations about how to look beyond the technology alone and consider the broader business context. He says, “Clients would come to me and say, ‘We know the problem we have, and there are certain technical solutions that will fit the mold and fix it.’ Before, I would have offered the tools that best fit what they described, and it would have been a quick fix. But now I have a new paradigm that lets me understand those problems on a different level and see them as business problems. I can say, ‘I have a technical background and understand what you’re saying. These are complex problems that don’t have one-way solutions. And I’m the person who can help solve them.’”
The Bigger Picture
While Toure has extensive experience in the water resources arena, his experience with MIT has allowed him to move out of that space alone and look at business sectors like healthcare and agriculture, among others. Last year, he began working with a venture capital fund that has allowed him to find opportunities with an array of companies, many of which are located in West Africa, where he has done work in the past. “I’ve gone back to where my parents are from to try and bring knowledge and help lead the development of infrastructure there,” he says. “I can bring American know-how and technology to their infrastructure projects so they can leapfrog mistakes we have made in the past in terms of sustainability.”
What’s more, Toure is excited to help clients all along the value chain. While he often advises about projects that are in the middle of the value chain, after the major decisions have been made, he knows that his MIT knowledge can be applied to all along that spectrum, from the very beginning of a project to the final stages. This will open myriad new opportunities for the budding strategic advisor.
Additionally, Toure is not done with his MIT Sloan experience. In fact, after achieving his ACE, he participated in yet another Executive Education course, Driving Strategic Innovation: Achieving High Performance Throughout the Value Chain. “Learning is a lifelong process. You have to have the mindset of being a continuous learner,” he concludes. “As far as I’m concerned, MIT is the biggest knowledge center that you can take advantage of. It will expand your confidence and confirm the fundamental knowledge that you have. It also will establish your credibility with clients, which has been very important for me working with clients in Africa, who see that I have been to MIT and say, ‘We’re listening to you.’ And I can say for sure that I will never stop learning as long as I can.”
Learn more about MIT Sloan Executive Certificates.