Event Brief
The Nairobi innovation week (5th – 9th March, 2018) brought together stakeholders from government, private sector, development partners and research centers with an aim of providing a platform for showcasing and encouraging innovation.
Aalto University organized a PBL workshop together with the C4DLab of Nairobi University and Luke. It introduced problem based learning to drive innovation in Kenya.
Nairobi Innovation Week discussed following topics: Agriculture and Food Safety, The Vulnerable & Persons with Disabilities, Kenya’s 15 Most Promising Startups 2018, Children & the Youth, AgriPreneurship, Commercialization of Research & Innovations, Innovation for/and SDGs, Big Data & Internet of Things, Innovation & the Private Sector, Women & Tech.
Nairobi Innovation Week: A milestone together
‘Who had milk for breakfast this morning?’ and ‘How safe do you think that milk is?’ These were the opening confronting questions of our presentation at the Nairobi Innovation week. We had been working hard towards this deliverable: the joint presentation where team Kenya and team Finland are ‘one’.
The road towards developing the pitch was an intense squeeze of all we had learned in the long days in the field we have had together. We spent full days in our apartment in the centre where we crunched all our insights onto the massive blueprint that practically covered the whole living room.
The general theme of the event was Improving food security through shared value and innovation. The goal of the event was to initiate a strong dialogue on ‘shared value’ / sustainable development approach especially between academia, the private sector and public sector in Africa. We felt honoured to present our problem based learning (PBL) approach and our insights in front of this diverse and expert audience on the food safety and security issues present in Kenya.
The feedback we received was positive: the audience resonated strongly with the solution spaces we found during the field trip. We felt happy that our intense deep-dive field trip was fruitful and actually hit some of the fundamental themes that are in need to be solved.
In the afternoon we held co-creative sessions for possible solutions. In total there were four multidisciplinary teams that developed concepts for tackling the Aflatoxins and food safety issues in Kenya. Team FoodAfrica spread over these four tables. It was amazing to discuss solutions in-depth with the experts. The winner of all solutions was SureFoods, of which you can read more about here.
You can also watch our pitch at Nairobi Innovation week here.
