Nigeria's First Open Innovation Hub is Here (CcHUB)!!!

Right in the middle of churches, schools, police stations, bars, typical Lagos market, popular bus stops and eateries; is a 182sqm open space secured on the 7th of June 2011 to house Nigeria’s first open living lab. The state-of-the-art facility named Co-creation Hub (CcHUB) will serve technologists, entrepreneurs, investors, tech companies and hackers in and around Lagos.

CcHUB is being designed as a multi-functional, multi-purpose space where work to catalyse creative social tech ventures take place. With 10mbps connection, a mobile application testing lab, dialogue café, a demo unit, thought shower corners and comfortable co-working space, the HUB is positioned to accelerate technology innovation and application for social good in Nigeria.

The hub will function at the heart of Nigeria’s technology innovation ecosystem as a place to:

•  facilitate creative thinking and collaborative problem solving
• encourage technology innovation for improved social accountability in Nigeria
• incubate novel tech ideas that promotes good governance/provision of public services
• encourage shared accountability between technologist & innovators
• serve as a living lab for prototyping and testing socially minded tech tools
• build new skills and competencies
• connect, share, create and find expertise

As described by Sarah Lacy, “CcHUB is a cushy nest for social change which welcomes more than just coders, but teachers, doctors, or anyone from any background that has a dramatic idea of how to make life in Nigeria better. A new co-working space to be opened later this year will operate like an open living lab for social change.”

Interested in making history with us? …get in touch to learn how you can support CcHUB in harnessing the power of technology for prosperity in Nigeria.

Facebook

Twitter: @Cc_HUB

Mobile: +234 705 844 6350, +234 813 624 1976

http://www.cchubnigeria.com

Report: Tech-In Governance

The maiden edition of the Tech-In Series took place on 24th - 26th of March 2011 at the Pan African University, Victoria Island campus Lagos. The 48hr experiment gathered geeks and designers with stakeholders from different walks of life to co-create novel web and mobile based solutions aimed at empowering citizen to contribute to good governance through citizen participation.

The open and temporary living lab was powered by intense collaboration where participants worked passionately to transform six back of the envelope ideas into working prototypes of social web and mobile based tools for better governance in Nigeria. While the projects and teams were centrally selected and allocated, the team’s ability to self-organise led to a successful experiment.

The Co-creation Hub team spent a significant amount of time planning and organising the unusual event behind the scene between December 2010 and March 2011. However, the organisation was mainly to ensure an enabling environment where the individual team could freely engage and organise for result. The gathering obviously thus demonstrates the power of crowd and how a well supported co-creation process can lead to well thought out solutions. Even with meagre resources, collective intelligence when properly harnessed proved invaluable at the end of the event.

The winner, "Residents’ Report" is a managed platform which allows citizens to point local problems to public institutions responsible to aid prompt fixing. The runner-up was "BudgIT", a web platform for user-friendly presentation of state and federal budget to include charts and performance analysis for proper understanding of what budget entails. The 2nd runner-up "Project Watch", is a project monitoring system which allows citizens to certify the execution of public projects.

I believe it is appropriate for me to claim that the investment in this series has been good value for money and I would like to say a special thank you to Indigo Trust, Enterprise Development Centre, Main One Cable and Funmobile. The viability of Tech-In Series of course is dependent on whether some of the projects turn into sustainable social ventures but we believe the commitment of the partners towards nurturing and mentoring the team will provide a strong driving force.

Beyond the immediate challenges being addressed by Tech-In Series, the impact of the initiative will demonstrate the importance of knowledge application for economic prosperity in Nigeria.

Let’s throw knowledge at our problems, facilitate innovation and encourage entrepreneurs to generate value from it all for the benefit of our society at large.


Olatunbosun Tijani – 6th of April 2011.