Last Friday, DiGi hosted #IdeaJam, the first ever idea accelerator session for its Challenge for Change (DiGiCFC) programme. This 4-hour interactive event gathered about 150 people including the Challenge’s best 60 idea contributors together with industry experts to refine the quality and potential of these ideas, in a bid to identify the season’s top 20.
In its fifth edition, the DiGi Challenge for Change aims to solve issues affecting the everyday Malaysian with mobile applications. Open to all Malaysians, the Challenge for Change programme rewards the best app ideas and provides a platform to connect the people with ideas with developers who could help make these ideas a reality.
This year, the DiGi Challenge for Change received over 2500 idea submissions, where they were narrowed down to 60 entries spanning across four categories ahead of the #IdeaJam session.
The four categories were Learning & Edutainment, Health & Wellness, Discovering Culture, and Connected Citizen. At the #IdeaJam accelerator session, these 60 ideators were paired with mentors in the four-hour event, who each are experts in their field of knowledge. Mentors present at the event include Efny Johan, iM4U Brand Management Group Director Rajiv Rishyakaran, Selangor State Assemblyman for Bukit Gasing (Connected Citizen category), and Dinesh Nair, the Director for Developer and Platform Evangelism at Microsoft SEA.
#IdeaJam was a development checkpoint to help augment the quality of the top ideas submitted for Challenge for Change, and maximise the potential impact of the resulting mobile apps. It provided a conducive platform for ideators to interact with 60 specially selected mentors from the respective fields of healthcare, education, culture and citizenship.
Input from the mentors helped build a social and technical context surrounding each idea, helping ideators make these ideas more compelling: having stronger commercial value, and a greater ability to address the social needs of Malaysians.
After the session, five ideators from each category were chosen for the final round, where only one winning idea will be selected from each category. Winners will be announced in mid-February, and will receive RM5000 and a smartphone each.
