Innovation Laboratory - Building Innovation Ecosystem In Rustavi
December 2021 – May 2022
Our next eventTrainings 28 - 29 May
Final Event 31 May
December 2021 – May 2022
Our next eventTrainings 28 - 29 May
Final Event 31 May
How to bring municipality, private sector, and academia closer to each
other? And how to provide young people with opportunities to develop
skills in fields with high-added value on the labour market, such as digital
technologies or business?
Tuesday, 31 May 2022 from 11AM until 2PM
Venue: College “Modus”, Zhiuli Shartava St 4, Rustavi
11:00 – 11:30 Opening remarks
11:30 – 12:00 Panel discussion: Opportunities for young people to enhance competencies and skills
12:00 – 13:00 Innovation Laboratory project: Concept and results
13:00 – 14:00 Lunch & Networking
Innovation Laboratory brings together a group of talented young people who are interested in digitalisation, software development and AI. Within the upcoming six months, it offers a unique training, real world experience and development of competencies relevant for the labour market. The participants will work on innovation projects coming from private sector, learn how to approach a real-world problem and how to design and deliver a tangible solution to it.
Four student teams involved in Innovation laboratory are currently working on challenges coming from private companies involved in our project:
Bank of Georgia is in need of automating website navigation and customer service through, ideally, a chatbot operating in Georgian language.
Golden Fleece Capital wants to create a platform for matching procurement opportunities in construction sector and possible solutions and materials on the market.
SIQA needs to digitalise and automate their internal processes related to registrations and accounting in order to optimise their functioning and be able to solidify and strengthen their community, communication, and consequently cadence of services offered.
Cafune, a local Rustavi community cafe found themselves in a situation where they need to bridge the gap between the shutdown of their old venue and the construction of a new one, effectively manage their (online) community, and maximise profits to be able to maintain operations.
There are only 8 weeks left to complete the Innovation Laboratory project. Student teams supported by mentors are now working hard on prototyping solutions to digital challenges. These range from machine learning and language processing, database creation, developing a procurrement platform for construction industry to a customer app for a social café. Facilitator Ondřej Brém and two students from Faculty of Informatics of the Czech Technical University in Prague Eliška Lieberzeitová and Roman Bushuiev spent last weekend with delivering the second training titled "Design the thing right" to students. The training included workshops on prototyping, testing, app development, machine learning and data processing. We also enjoyed inspiring discussions and networking with the Bank of Georgia AI Lab team led by Irakli Gogatishvili, Iveri Kutsnashvili from GF Capital and Pavle Tvaliashvili from SIQA. Look into gallery to find out more.
Read MoreOur journey into innovations and technologies started virtually in December 2021. In January 2022, all organizers, trainers, mentors, participants and representatives of companies came together in Rustavi for the first training. Watch our video and gallery from to learn more!
Read MoreOur trainer Sara Polak captured impressions about her first visit to Georgia and involvement in the Innovation Laboratory project: "It was a whirlwind journey from start to finish, and the funniest (and simultaneously greatest) thing is that it’s only just begun. ..."
Read MoreYou will meet other team members and your mentors. You will have the opportunity to get to know everyone and ask for any clarifications that might be needed. You will learn more about the challenges and how to approach the first - research phase of the project.
You will work with your team, mentor and the company contact person on learning as much as possible about the problem at hand. You will also be researching the context in which the problem exists (who has the problem, why do they have the problem, how do they deal with it now) and the overall context in which the company operates.
Here we will together decide with the use of design workshops what is the right thing/problem to solve and how to deal with coming up with potential solutions. At the end of the weekend you will have a bunch of tools you can use with the team to find and create solutions for your problem.
Using the tools from the weekend training and any other tools that your mentors might provide you, you will propose, develop and test quickly many potential solutions. The more the better.
The final one or two solutions will be selected. With those you will learn how to develop them further and how to prototype and validate them in an iterative way.
You will use the tips from last training and create prototypes and test them with real users to see what works and what doesn't. With that you will iteratively arrive to one final prototype which has been tested and improved several times over.
Reflection on your work, how to present and sell your idea and finally you will present your final results.
Public pitching and delivery of the final prototype.
We are very happy to work with these companies on following topics:
data processing and question answering in Georgian language for customer support
system for market monitoring which would strengthen B2B opportunities
system for registration of students and accounting
This project is implemented by Czech company UNICO.AI together with two local partners - Business and Technology University and Rustavi Innovation Hub. It aims to enhance competencies and skills of young people in Rustavi and strengthen the local innovation ecosystem while bringing municipality, private companies, and universities together. The goal is to support the city of Rustavi in its vision to become a place which provides opportunities and perspectives to young people living here and to attract and nurture new talent in fields with high-added value on the labour market, such as IT, AI, technology, or business. The project is being implemented on behalf of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) with the financial support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic.
Design Sprint is a 5 day method taking your project through 5 steps (see picture). The main idea behind is to think about the end users from the beginning of the development and to iteratively improve understanding and concepts for solutions.
Double diamond develops a project in two stages each giving an answer to one of the following questions:
Ondřej is the main facilitator of the Innovation Laboratory. He studied IT at the Czech Technical University in Prague and Interaction between humans and computer at the Aalto university in Finland.
His focus is on UX, Service Design and application of HCD methods in education. He is the founder and organizer of educational hackathon UniHack.cz. At the Czech Technical University Ondřej promotes design thinking as an approach for designing services and products. His experiences and inspiration for his educational projects such as summer schools for students come from his stays in Estonia, Finland and Sweden
Sara is an Oxford-educated archaeologist working in artificial intelligence. She has worked in startups in London and LA for 7 years.
After almost 10 years abroad she returned to the Czech Republic to help centralise the innovative and technological environment and boost Czech Republic's economy and society through multidisciplinary scalable adoption of cutting-edge technologies
I am a student at the University of Business and Technology, majoring in Business Administration and Management. I have worked in a number of startups and workshops, including being a junior entrepreneur. My favorite organizational activities are project management and marketing, I see myself in this field in the future.
Student of Business and Technology University, department of Information Technology. He has knowledge and skills of coding using languages: C++, JAVA, JAVASCRIPT, KOTLIN, PYTHON. He is experienced working on operational systems such as: WINDOWS and LINUX.
Student of Business and Technology University, department of Management. He is interested in StartUp projects and indepths knowledge and experience in this direction. He has experianced working on technology StartUp projects in education, health and social activism.
Is youth worker and youth specialist at Rustavi Innovation Hub. He leads enrollment and development component. Mainly he works on initiatives directed to solve youth problems based on digital and non-digital solutions. He has ten years of teaching, mentoring and facilitation work experience.
