Calling Egyptian Youth: Let's Build Digital Solutions to Solve Industrial Challenges

GE
Designed to leverage both the power of the Industrial Internet and the creativity and ingenuity of the Egypt’s young people, the GE Egypt Digital Innovation Challenge will support Egypt’s vision to build an innovative society that seeks to produce advances in science, technology and overall knowledge.
6 September 2016
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GE Africa (Lagos)

The paradox of the Industrial Internet is that it's expected to have a much bigger impact on the economy than the consumer internet, all while doing things that aren't as eye-catching as hailing a taxi, sending messages to friends or streaming music. Instead, the Industrial Internet helps us do extremely important things like stabilize the power grid, help hospitals track their equipment or remotely monitor a rail fleet.

The enormous impact of such digital solutions are behind a new open innovation challenge that GE is launching in Egypt in partnership with the Egyptian Ministry of Communication and Information Technology and the Technology Innovation & Entrepreneurship Center.

Designed to leverage both the power of the Industrial Internet and the creativity and ingenuity of the Egypt's young people, the GE Egypt Digital Innovation Challenge will support Egypt's vision to build an innovative society that seeks to produce advances in science, technology and overall knowledge.

This challenge will not only help expand Egypt's digital ecosystem; it also will boost economic development in the key sectors of energy, healthcare and transportation. The challenge targets students, small and medium enterprises, entrepreneurs and everyone with a passion for software development to help solve three key industrial challenges.

The three challenges are:

Energy

Develop a digital solution that helps stabilize the electric grid as various power sources such as gas, wind, solar and coal go online and offline, an increasingly significant issue as Egypt continues to diversify its energy mix.

Healthcare

Develop a digital solution that helps hospitals track the location and status of their equipment, thereby enhancing process, operations and flow.

Transportation

Develop a digital solution to remotely monitor rail fleets to record information about operations, maintenance cycles and scheduling as Egypt seeks to raise the share of freight transported in Egypt by rail from 1% to 10% within 15 years.

Submissions to the challenge will be accepted between September 5 and November 30, 2016. One winner will be selected for each sector – energy, healthcare and transportation – and each will receive a cash award of EGP 100,000, as well as an opportunity to receive training to develop their software solution on Predix*.

Predix is GE's cloud-based operating system for applications that connect industrial assets, collect and analyze big data, and then deliver real-time insights to help optimize industrial infrastructure and operations.

Yasser El Kady, Minister of Communications and Information Technology in Egypt, stated: "We aim to create a strong base of competent entrepreneurs capable of utilizing technology to address Egypt's challenges. This new partnership supports our mission and help innovators and software developers master and design digital solutions for industry, and showcase their capability to work with the government and global technology innovators."

If you have one idea or many that could help in any of these three areas, read more about the challenge and submit your application on the GE Digital Innovation Challenge page.

This is the fourth Open Innovation Challenge that GE has launched in the region, following those in Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Turkey. These other challenges addressed issues such as rural healthcare access, energy efficiency in industry, sustainable seawater desalination, and manufacturing for the energy sector.

Make sure you visit our challenge page today: http://invent.ge/EgyptDigitalChallenge.

* Terms & conditions apply. The cash prize is subject to the Egyptian tax law and its regulations.

This article first appeared on GE Hewar blog

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