11 Jan The HUBiquitous Accelerator Programme

The HUBiquitous project aims to create a joint Africa-Europe innovation ecosystem for long- term collaborations and partnerships. Backed by a consortium of five European and four African partners, HUBiquitous seeks to create and support Digital Innovation Hubs (DIHs) and TechHubs in 5 African countries, with the ambition to increase their technological level and consolidate their technical and business development capabilities for the provision of cutting-edge solutions to Africa’s emerging problems.

One of the programs of this project is the HUBiquitous Accelerator Program, whose aim is to foster the creation of new applications, services and products by African entrepreneurs/startups by providing technical and business support in order to improve their technical capabilities. Our goal is to offer a high quality acceleration program that allows selected African entrepreneurs to develop applications and products in order to turn their pilot ideas into viable companies/products (MVPs).

The program started last November and will last for 6 months. The African entrepreneurs were selected through an open call, through which the 17 most promising, sustainable and innovative proposals that integrate IoT technology in five different sectors were selected: Agri- Food, Smart Cities, Health, Industry 4.0 and Green Economy.

This program includes mentoring and intensive training within the following blocks:

Business Definition & Strategy: offering the necessary tools to entrepreneurs in design-thinking and defining what their business model will be, as well as their  Go-To-Market strategy, identifying the characteristics of their start-up and creating an action plan that facilitates the insertion of their product/service in the market.

Prototyping & MVP: participants will benefit from technical kits for prototyping and testing. In these technical sessions, entrepreneurs will be able to familiarize themselves with the basics of IoT, Basic Electronics, Prototyping Kits, Big data tools, AI development tools and platforms, etc.

Growth & Investment Readiness: in order to facilitate access to funding to boost their ventures. To this end, 2 interactive workshops will be held on investment readiness, the planning and process of fundraising, etc.

In addition, the program includes cross-cutting activities during the six months:

Networking activities: through MeetHub (the project’s collaborative platform), entrepreneurs will be able to establish a network of contacts that will contribute to generate new professional opportunities.

Mentoring and Coaching: participants have access to a permanent service to receive coaching
and connect with a network of Mentors.