News from Cairo - RiseUp Summit 2018
In december we had the chance to travel to Egypt and be part of the biggest entrepreneurship summit of the MENA Region (Middle East North Africa). Since we are both experienced in supporting evolving startups and putting their ideas in to proper business models we were eager to find out what is happening in Egypt.
The RiseUp Summit offers everything from workshops, inspiring talks, and panel discussions to startup stations, pitch competitions, and networking platforms with industry experts. We could add 2 workshops to the program:
1) In partner with the Egyptian Startup Manifesto we hosted a breakfast session at a restaurant in Downtown Cairo about “Feedback & Meeting culture” - The participants could learn about and experience simple tools to improve their team work, team communication and hold up better meetings that actually have an output.
2) Inbetween the main stage and the whole summit feeling at the Greek Campus we gave a Deep Dive Session: “Introduction to Design Thinking” - The participants caught a glimpse of the process and for what kind of problems it may be applied.
The atmosphere during the summit was vibrant and truely inspiring for us. We met local businesses, emerging startups, established startups, entrepreneurs from Dubai and their future approaches to design a more participatory future, we learned about modest fashion, the accelerating rise of social media influence in Egypt and that intercultural exchange is where we want to have more from this year.
OUR MAIN TAKEAWAYS & BIGGEST LEARNINGS:
Be more patient and whatever happens just happens, it’s nothing personal - we thought we are already super flexible, relaxed and nothing can really crash our workshop concepts :) but we learned we are still truely german and we are flexible in a german context. On the one hand we already knew that a workshop during a conference is always hard and people just cannot concentrate for a long time and people drop in and out but this time we really got challenged :)
Breakfast doesn’t stop a workshop - our first event was at a breakfast restaurant (what we did not know in advance) and all the participants could order free food :) interesting concept but it worked out.
We need to learn more about the future and look out for best practices because there are alredy some- There are a lot of inspiring projects, business models and organisations out there that test and already develop ideas for our future society, e.g. Dubai. To see what they already do and what they plan is something we in Germany should aim for.
Cairo is a vibrant city with a vibrant startup scene and a lot of highly motivated actors. We were lucky to visit KMT House. It is designed as a hub for urban innovators, KMT House is a beating heart of urbantech in Cairo and a gathering place for creative minds to think.
We thank the whole RiseUp Team which made everything possible for us and put together an unforgettable experience. But see yourself:
