I’m Asmaa Kamel and I work as the Program Manager of Yomken.com
Yomken.com is a regional platform, based in Cairo and currently works in 4 countries in the MENA region. We crowdsource R&D solutions for social and industrial challenges to make them more affordable and accessible to those who need them. Those include NGOs, Micro-finance institutions and governmental organizations. We do this through a crowd of innovative students, engineers, scientists and creative people in general. The challenges published on our platform varies between product design and development, production process optimization, usage of alternative raw material, and others.
In addition to solving the challenges, our model contributes to creating new job opportunities and provide innovators and entrepreneurs with the chance to work on real-life challenges and establish market-driven startups.
hey @asmaa_kamel what yomken is doing is very interesting, and I believe we can collaborate together in this open village project or any other one.
I am interested to know more about Yomken community, and how does the “wisdom of the crowd” works, do you reach out to universities as local collaborators, how do you keep track on the loose community ( I am interested to know about the innovators that respond to the challenges you post for example )
you can check the open village proposed vision by @matthiashere and here is what we are doing now. I am interested to know your opinion and how can you see yomken fitting in this and how do you think we can collaborate ?
hello Asmaa , it pleasure to know you , I saw Yomken platform before, actually i’m trying to join your call for ( Digital furniture - with Giza System ) via my startup Bitcut, right now i’m working on the design model .i liked the whole idea of innovation promoting and connecting investors with the designer .
But :Im asking if there is real examples of products or companies got the chance to get investment through Yomken ? what is the problem you facing ?
Hello Zmorda
Yes we have an office in Tunisia since October last year and are expanding this year to Jordan and Morocco isA. You can check some of the work we did in Tunisia through these links:
thanks for useful links Asma , yes with pleasure I am Zmorda from Tunisia an engineer and I am working as a Junior business advisor for a consulting company in Tunisia , and one of our activities is supporting new entrepreneurs to define their business model , raise funds …
Thanks Tantawy for getting in touch, the idea of your startup is very interesting and you should definitely submit your design in the challenge! This is the first action in a series by Giza Systems Foundation as they want to spread the concept of digital fabrication in many fields and fro many purposes.
We have a few cases where people managed to get funding to continue developing the solutions they implemented using the challenge fund (in many cases the result is a prototype), however, this is mainly through linking them with business incubators or they apply for competitions and have greater chances of winning given they have a working solution and at least one customer.
Before 2014 we were also providing a crowdfunding service through a pre-ordering model and many products got funded this way.
We’re always looking for good challenges that solve critical industrial problems &/or have great social impact, as well as, reaching out to creative solvers.
I hope this answers your question and we can talk further if you’re coming tomorrow!
Sounds interesting…if you like I can link you with our team in Tunisia. We can collaborate in solving the challenges faced by your entrepreneurs. Feel free to contact me at akamel@yomken.com if you’re interested.
We reach out to different innovators depending on the challenge but this typically includes people in our database (students, fresh grads, professionals, professors, expats etc.). We also approach universities and research centers through the Technology and Innovation Commercialization Offices (TICO), as well as, co-working spaces, maker spaces etc.
I’m looking forward to know about the Open Village project tomorrow and we can definitely see about potential collaboration.
Are you developing the same activities in Tunisia ?