Asian Inclusive Business Challenge – Moving along towards a solution

Since the introductory week end presented our challenge to us, three weeks have passed incredibly fast. We had fantastic team meetings, a very interesting “building impact” workshop and plenty of inspiration.

Our team’s challenge is in general terms to enhance inclusive business practices of Asian firms in Africa, thus to innovate programs that offer benefit to both the local population and the firms. Since we are of opinion that all great things begin with a great name, we dubbed our task the “Asian-African Win-Win challenge” (A²W² and any variation of these letters, that you can possibly think of).

With input from past workshops, we explored the stakeholder environment in a mind map and analyzed their “pains and gains” in order to see potential needs more clearly. Apart from the realization that innovation can be approached very methodically, these steps helped us to confront this big task and put it into more manageable smaller pieces. This is especially important for us, since we have many potential target users of our innovation and even more potential ways to approach them.

Indeed, possible roads that we want to explore have been numerous so far. In one notably creative brainstorming session we had uncommon ideas that ranged from the idea of using empty buses that bring workers to their workplaces (on their return) to starting a Chinese-African dating platform to address the culture gaps. Without wanting to give away too much of our final solution just yet, it is safe to say that we focus on ways to have both sides (business and locals) profit from a cooperation. This means to go well beyond traditional calls for corporate social responsibility, which more often than not, rely on the good will of firms willing to sacrifice resources. Overcoming this means more concretely, to tap into resources that so far have lied unused. This can be for reasons of little cultural exchange or business approaches with seemed to be the least risky, but are ultimately more dangerous. These unused potentials are the innovators joy.

Thus, we remain very motivated and look forward to working on and presenting our program in about one and a half month. Until then, we will have a building impact session and a group meeting coming up next weekend, plenty of research to conduct on our topic and meetings with mentors as well as the challenge setter to schedule. And last but not least, find some free time to let this beautiful city, where we have the privilege to live, inspire us.

Stay tuned for upcoming innovations!

Your A²W² Team