© Philipp Benedikt/Alexander Mattersberger
On Saturday, October 26, 2013 the conference was closed and at night the award ceremony took place. All delegates moved by train to the beach esort Mount Lavina for this occassion. My coleague from India, Madanmohan Rao, wrote a blog posting about the winners and drew his conclusions.
Every two years, contestants from over 150 countries around
the world compete to win the World Summit Awards for best e-Content. The awards
are given in 10 categories and are rigorously judged by an international jury
according to criteria such as meeting the United Nations Millennium Development
Goals.
The winners are honoured at a gala and also participate in
an international conference where they present their projects and discuss their
plans and impacts. I was delighted to be a juror and moderator for the category
of e-Inclusion and Empowerment. Here are my key takeaways from contributions of
the winning entries, and recommendations for social entrepreneurs who wish to
make a mark in this category.
Blindsquare from Finland is an augmented reality GPS
application for the blind. It obtains information about the surrounding
environment from Foursquare and Open Street Maps. Its algorithms enable it to
determine the most relevant information, and then voice it out using high
quality speech synthesis. For example, “What’s the most popular café within 200
meters radius?” or “How much longer before I get off my train?”
The Specialized Educational Portal from Romania is initiated
by the Ministry of National Education. It services 14,000 students with special
educational needs, and consists of an online environment to observe, discover,
prove, verify and measure results of different experiments and simulations. The
portal uses avatars to embody the roles of teachers, learners, peers and observers.
Sheeplive.eu from Slovakia was initiated by the civic
association eSlovensko. It uses an animated environment with sheep as main
characters to teach children about safer use of the Internet, mobile phones and
new technologies. The project has developed 652 tools with over two million
downloads in two years for products such as quizzes, ebooks, games, and
wallpapers.
New Urban Mechanics of Boston and Philadelphia from the US
is a multi-city civic innovation incubator and R&D network dedicated to improving
the lives of city residents. It helps innovators connect with government
through project proposals to improve urban civic life using.
TAM Hub from Saudi Arabia uses contests and crowdsourcing to
help citizens identify pressing problems and then collectively put together
solutions. The portal is used to link and expose entrepreneurs to contests and
provide them with tips to clarify their ideas and projects. It allows the
public to engage with entrepreneurs and express their opinions about the most liked
ideas or projects. The initiative is expanding to five other Arab countries.
In the panel discussion at the conference, these social
innovators had a range of useful lessons to share with other aspiring
entrepreneurs:
1. The toughest moment for an entrepreneur is when you have
a seed of an idea but no one believes it can become a tree. But don’t give up!
2. The best moment for those working in social enterprise is
not money or prizes but when people thank you from the bottom of their heart
for what you are doing, eg. a teacher’s best moment is when a parent of a
differently abled child thanks you for teaching them.
3. Engage the entire ecosystem and not just the target
audience, eg. the parents and friends of differently abled students.
4. Leverage the power of the crowd not just to solve
problems but also understand the problem itself, frame it in different ways,
and prioritise it with respect to other problems.
5. Use business models like syndication and licensing to
spread your good work in social entrepreneurship. Partnership and alliance
management strategies are key: choose partners who truly share the social
values and ethical principles that you respect.
6. Don’t shun government: reach out to them and win them
over as partners, because they can help truly scale your project in the long
run.
The overall winner in this category was judged to be
BlindSquare, a laudable achievement for a team which includes only app
developer! If one app developer alone can achieve such excellence, imagine what
millions of inspired app developers around the world can do!
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