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The four of us arrived Mombasa early in the morning on Saturday January 15th after a 20 hour long travel starting in Oslo. We were picked up by a representative from the hotel who drove us safely through the Mombasa night to Milele Beach Hotel. The hotel is situated north of Mombasa city on the Bamburi Beach and our apartment is just 100 metres from the beach. Milele Beach Hotel is in a non-alcoholic and non-smoking zone so as proper holidaymaking Norwegians (including one Serbian) we have enjoyed the last two days on the beach with a coke in our hands. The temperature is about 30 degrees celsius, both in the air and water. Fortunately it has been quite windy so laying at the beach has been really nice. We have now re-charged our batteries and are ready to do some work. We start early tomorrow morning with a meeting at Sollatek, who will install the solar panels at Makobe Primary School. According to them, the installment will start tomorrow (Monday 17th). After the meeting we will pick up Holger Jonasson who will travel with us to Shimba Hills, our base for the next week. We have booked rooms at Mama Wambui; a nice place with beds, but no showers. So it will be an interesting week.

We are not sure how the internet connection will be at Shimba Hills, but we will give you an update as soon as possible.

Friday afternoon at 14:00 Mari, John-Fredrik, Marsil and Tage were in the office booking the tickets for our trip down to Kenya. We will travel down to Kenya in January! We are REALLY excited, but my gosh we also have a lot of planning to do before we leave! We hope that we will be able to document the trip thoroughly - and we will of course post everything online once we are back.

The last month we have been working really hard on the financing side of the project and we are happy to say (although it is an ongoing process) we have managed to raise most of what we wanted for the solar panel installation. If you are following us on facebook you have seen that we have a solar-micro finance scheme here on our homepage - this has proven to be a success with 100 shares sold, far away from the 1000 we were hoping for but still a great success. Of course there is still time to support us as the more money we will raise more solar power bought once we are in place in Kenya.

In the month of January we will start distributing a magazine in the North of Norway which has been another source of revenue; it is a collection of articles and stories from the innovation environment in Tromsø where we have sold ads to finance the printing of the magazine and additional revenues has gone to the project.

We will keep you posted on further developments!

BCE Impulse

Thursday was all about scaling and diffusing the idea but began with the Kennisland representative that started the creative commons movement in the Netherlands – which was an interesting talk. After that we spent most of the day in our groups, with some brilliant input from Domnic Wind from Paloma 5 – a brilliant event that took place in Berlin last year.

The latter part of the day we spent in an eco office space in Keizersgracht where we were told the story of young successful entrepreneurs that believes in eco-innovation and consulting other companies on how to be more corporate social responsibility minded.

The days here at the Kennisland event has been filled to the brim with activities and it has been much harder finding the time to write about the experiences than I would have expected. But that means that there is a lot more to tell about, which is great! I’m now going to try and summarize the second day, but a lot more reflection is needed to tell the whole story (which I most certainly will at some point).

Tuesday 13th
Worked from 08:30, to around 03:00

We started the day with going through the overview over what the Social innovation process for the Kennisland Safari contains:

1 Prompts (Monday)
2 proposals (Tuesday)
3 prototypes (Wednesday)
4 Scaling + Diffusion (Thursday)
5 Real change (Friday)

Start of day #2

The essence of what we were trying to achieve for day two were as follows;
- Using what is already there and strengthening the strong points
- Creating platforms for people to speak up and move beyond the expert and non-expert distinction.

Tage chose to work with the Mix academy, which I talked about briefly in the previous post, and Mari chose to work with the weekend school. Mari has to tell her story separately as it’s me Tage who’s writing this blog at the moment ☺.

Some highlights on what we were encouraged to achieve during the prototyping was to:

Think big, act small
Find the innovators
Innovation begins when people start moving
Search for new combinations
Use content and form
Make it contagious

From creativity & bold ideas to innovation through implementation

Prototypes: Modelling, testing, market research, building, interventions visualising, persuading…!

The mix academy case

The team that was put together for the mix academy case consisted of 6 people; 2 american, 1 spanish, 1 dutch, 1 russian and 1 Norwegian. From the point of forming the group until we had to go back and meet Ralph de Lange, the owner and visionary behind the Mix Academy Amsterdam.

In essence, the Mix Academy is a school for young people to come and make art. It is a private school that teaches finding your voice through creativity, this is formulated through “finding your true self”. It’s curriculum runs for two years, and last year the school had 12 full time students and around 35-40 part time students. The philosophy of “finding your true self” is centred around the full time students and the part time students come there mostly to learn some techniques and seems to be a more traditional evening school for older aspiring artists. The case brief was to explore why the academy is not growing as it should be. The client in essence wanted a way to explore why this is not happening.

The process for the day can be summarized into these points:

#1 Forming the group
#2 Meeting Ralph again
#3 Discussing in the cafe afterwards
#4 meeting the potential student that did not attend
#5 going back presenting Ralph with findings
#6 deciding on what to present afterwards to panel of experts
#7 presentation and feedback from panel
#8 using feedback from panel to form an intervention

The last point and the feedback from the panel in the park was the most important in forming the structure for the last day, which I will talk more about in the next post.

We are on our way to the Kennisland Safari in Amsterdam and we will be giving you updates throughout the week here and on facebook!

Mari has already landed and Tage is landing right in the middle of the World cup finals!