First DIGILOGIC IIB Meeting

Experts and leaders from different areas of the innovation and logistics sector in Europe and Africa gathered for the first Impact and Innovation Board Meeting to meet their peer members, get a shared understanding of DIGILOGIC’s ambitions and spark insightful discussions to inform upcoming activities.

DIGILOGIC’s Impact and Innovation Board consists of selected experts in the field, from a diverse set of backgrounds and geographies, who have expertise in a subset of the topics that the project is developing. Our experts will meet three times a year and they will help us to:

• Mentor DIGILOGIC innovators and support their solutions uptake.
• Support the design DIGILOGIC co-creation labs.
• Strengthen the collaboration among Digital Innovation Hubs at regional and international level, beyond DIGILOGIC project.
• Facilitate the involvement of companies / experts to support the 12 DIGILOGIC Challenges Teams in their go-to-market strategies.
• Create the link with African diaspora associations to develop further opportunities of collaboration and innovation.

DIGILOGIC organised its first Impact and Innovation Board Meeting on Wednesday 18th of August, with the participation of six expert Board members, Nanko Madu Senior Programme Manager of AfriLabs, David Coleman Founder and CEO of Cole Collective, Sesinam Dagadu Founder of SnooCode, Onyekachi Wambu Executive Director at the African Foundation for Development (AFFORD), Juha Kunnas Head of Product at Vakava Technologies, Obaro M. Osah AGM, SME South, SME Group at the Bank of Industry

Bongo-Hive lead the board members in a virtual tour of the DIGILOGIC Community and their advised to:

• Plug the Community to channels aspiring entrepreneurs and innovators already use.
• Add specific topics to cover some of the skill gaps young start-ups face such as M&E, sustainable business model development and partnership for growth.

VTT introduced DIGILOGIC Challenges and the IIB members provided some food for thought:

• Idea-stage and full-fledge scaled start-ups have different resources available, different needs and it might be hard to select among them first and support them later. Therefore, the IIB members suggest to identify in advance the maturity level required to participate in the Challenges and ensure that services provided to the selected ones is appropriately tailored.
• The possibility to include some quotas regarding gender and age to ensure that women and young entrepreneurs are engaged.