WAZIHUB (in Swahili for Open-Hub) is an EU-Africa innovation project aiming to create a network of “Open Hubs” for designing IoT and Big Data solutions, adapted for the local environment. The vision of WAZIHUB is to exploit IoT potential and share IoT Technologies best-practices through the involvement of innovation communities and stakeholders. Our targets are young entrepreneurs (including woman), startups, developers and innovation Hubs operating at the local level, but also at the national level and African-wide. The project enables the creation of Open Hubs throughout Africa, where IoT technology can then be adapted to match local service needs. The project goal is to iterate and extract value from value-added IoT innovative services based on the in WAZIUP IoT technologies (www.waziup.io).
WAZIHUB target is to support, at large-scale, innovative users and usage of the above-mentioned technologies, with a goal towards the sustainability and wider-impact of the proposed solutions. Sustainability is one of the main concerns of innovation projects therefore the consortium will jointly target finding more and more users around WAZIHUB and offer a value to them based on their requirements, enabling them to easily tailor existing solutions to their needs.
In order to reach the WAZIHUB vision, the project addresses the following objectives:
• Accessibility of the technology, promoting the concept of a “smart village” reference model: Local accessibility of the fine-grained, affordable, simple to use IoT-Cloud solutions/development-kits for rapid prototyping and testing ideas and fostering innovation
• Accessibility of process for start-up creation and acceleration: Through engagement of local innovation hubs, the creation of new IoT business spin-offs and start-ups and acceleration process is to be applied in a local and shared in an African-wide IoT WAZIHUB ecosystem (e.g. what steps and paths to be followed when, with what technology, for what purpose)
• Accessibility of business models and partnership for sustainability and growth-hacking: Enabling stakeholders to more easily catalyze around valid, innovative and tested propositions; WAZIHUB will show how to replicate the successful involvement of stakeholders around innovative services (e.g. what business model, funding, partnerships, first market replication).
