Airtel Ghana, IBM Organise Mobile Innovation Contest

Airtel Ghana in collaboration with IBM Ghana is organising a mobile innovation competition for students of the University of Ghana, Legon to sensitise the students to issues relating to mobile technology.

The Managing Director of Airtel Ghana, Philip Sowah in a statement issued in Accra, explained that “Airtel, in its bid to spread its innovation mantra to young people in schools and to encourage entrepreneurship as a means of curtailing graduate unemployment, decided to collaborate with IBM Ghana which had similar ideas”.

“What we seek to do is to collaborate to produce a pilot competition on mobile innovation with 50 students from the University of Ghana, Legon who will come up with ideas that use IBM Lotus Connections to develop an IT based solution to an identified problem”, Mr. Sowah said.

He added that an agreed scenario and problem statement will be presented to the students prior to the event scheduled for Saturday April 21 2012. Through the use of a collaborative tool such as ‘Lotus Greenhouse’, Mr Sowah said the students would be asked to innovative ideas on how to monetise the mobile platform to create technological products.

Throwing more light on the competition, Head of Corporate Communications and External Affairs at Airtel Ghana, Mr Donald Gwira said the best 20 ideas would be selected and the students behind them will receive coaching/mentoring to prepare them for the panel evaluation.

Mr Gwira explained that the ideas will be assessed by a panel of IBM and Airtel judges and the winner of the competition will be flown to Nairobi, Kenya to participate in the ‘Innovation Discovery – Airtel Africa Workshop’. Runners up in the competition will receive one year Airtel data subscription with all participants receiving Airtel and IBM products.

Mr Gwira added that, “what we are doing with IBM Ghana is not a mere marketing drive but a very bold statement that we want to show all those IT savvy young people that there is so much more that can be derived from the Internet. Airtel’s 3.75G service with our affordable data bundles ensures that we can access the Internet at an affordable and greater speed”.