There are numerous challenges that our world is facing. Poverty, global warming, and pandemic to name a few. Various international forums aim to resolve these challenges and find solutions which are effective on a large scale. However, individual focus towards damaging effects of these challenges is missing which results in tensions and complexities of our society. For example, humans have now come up with covid-19 vaccine but work opportunities during the entire lockdown remain limited. Therefore, due to resulting poverty and financial losses, the victory against the pandemic is left short.
Commonly, world leaders are privileged people, who see a problem as a whole and often miss the intricacies involved. On the other hand, an ordinary person living life in the middle of the problem is more deeply affected by a problem and is able to find out which solution works best. They may have the ideas to reduce the impact of a global challenge but often lack necessary support, and funding for implementation.
Our solution, “UNITE” is a platform where innovators and entrepreneurs with great ideas, plans and systems can advertise their solution to companies with similar interests. The platform can be delivered both as an app and a webpage. The aim is to bring the people with the ideas together with companies with the intent of potential investment and mentoring in order to increase the impact of the ideas and support implementation. The goal is to provide innovators with some opportunities to change the world as a whole and not just have great ideas which get forgotten.
#entrepreneurship #changetheworld
@Ferheen Ayaz @ulas
Greetings, Team 21!
I have been asked to provide you some "mentorship", which - given the sad circumstances - will probably be limited to exchanging comments here (unless you've got other ideas or requests - let me know!). I am a programmer by education and trade (although I don't write too much code these days) with a significant interest in "technology for good" (as you may guess from the my involvement with EWB ;-)
The principle of your idea appeals to me a lot! I definitely believe that helping people help themselves is more sustainable than "simply" helping them (the "fish vs rod" approach). Also, incredible success of crowdfunding sites worldwide shows that it can work.
A couple of challenges I'd like you to consider and address:
* How are you going to position your service against more-or-less competitors like Kickstarter, Indiegogo or Republic? What have you learned from looking at their solutions? Are there particular ideas you want to re-use? Modify? Improve? What will make UNITE different?
* Note that all three sites I mentioned above are US-centric and may not be appropriate in other parts of the World, be it only due to payment options (the idea of credit card is absolutely alien in most countries of Africa, South-Eastern Asia or Central America). How will you make UNITE locally appropriate in places where "not-smart" phones are predominant (if available at all) and mobile payment services like M-Pesa are what cards and Paypal are for us? May I suggest researching solutions like UNICEF's U-Report to see how to apply "communication technology" without increasing risk of digital exclusion?
* How will you address the problem of IP rights and protection? Simply put: if I reveal my revolutionary business idea, what stops other individuals from copying it? What will be the incentive for a corporation to involve me in developing my idea further?
* Running internet services can be surprisingly expensive, particularly when they achieve significant success and popularity. How is UNITE going to be funded to make it sustainable and not fall victim of its own success?
* And finally, building complex internet services from scratch is (perhaps *not* surprisingly) a complex problem. Are there any (probably open source) solutions that you could base on to accelerate UNITE development and deployment?
Also, I'd like you to include, in your final submission, information about thought process you went through and research you've done on the way to your idea.
Now, I'm here to help you with finding the right answers. Help me to help you ;-) by... asking questions, challenging my claims and providing more details about the idea. I very much hope we'll have some fun while doing this :-)
Thanks for participating in the competition and looking forward to hearing from you
Paweł