BrainGiga is a platform built to help students and recent graduates gain experience and prove their technical skills. BrainGiga partners with Companies who provide a real-business challenge for registered student users to solve and propose an innovation driven solution . All participants receive feedback at the end of each challenge.In short, BrainGiga is an online platform where students get money,gain project experience for proposing solutions to interestin.
The Challenge/ Problem
In a country where skills shortages are ranked as one of the major contributions to unemployment, then for graduates to be unemployed is mind bugging. About 80 % of students’ lack internship experience when they leave school, resulting in catch 22 situations where they are unable to find employment because they lack the technical and hard skills. However, for them to gain the much need experience they require a form of formal employment. On the contrary, many organisations report facing the challenge of finding appropriately trained graduates with complex problem-solving skills, critical thinking, good judgement and decision-making, as well as cognitive flexibility.
How are we Responding to this Challenge!
We are in the processes of developing an online platform for students, to solve real business challenges and contests designed for technical skills development, and for them to engage and connect with potential employers in real skills setting environment.
The key goal for our innovation is to expose tertiary students to real life and business problems for them to develop problem-solving skills, critical thinking and fostering an innovative generation of a future workforce.
So what is our Idea and why is it Unique!
Our product is an Innovation Driven Crowdsourcing Technology, that helps students. We partner with Business Organisations who are seeking to crowdsource breakthrough innovation, ideas, insights, concepts for R& D, new products, service and process design. We turn their problems into challenges for students to solve and submit Innovation Driven Work Samples, and win cash rewards.
Why is this idea unique:
We are affording students a fair and equal creative ground for them to showcase their abilities, prove beyond gender, institution brand and race their capabilities and potential? In addition, we reward the students with cash incentives for their displayed talent and innovation. When you look at it, what we offer it is a win-win solution. For Hosting companies, not only do we connect them to talented future employees, in addition, our open innovation model enables them to co-create with the students, and customers to crowdsource breakthrough innovations and new ideas.
Why we need you!
Being a start-up in tech, the major obstacle to overcome in the early stages of a business is the initial capital required to fund the development, and finance the pilot phase. We have decided to prove the effectiveness of our model we need to pilot with 4 organisations: – Start the ball rolling, and give 200 registered students projects to work on. – Gain traction and build business cases.
Where are we at?
The journey up until now has been a long one, with lots of lessons learnt along the way. The Beta Platform will be live on the 26 October 2016 Counting, we have 200 registered students and graduates’ users. We are in the processes of seeking partnerships with organisations to pilot the project with.
Why back us?
We have 100% confidence and trust our team and our ability to contribute a better South Africa, and we want you to trust in that as well.
We are team of visionaries, who wants to make the school to employment transition better for graduates.
The R10 000.00 will be used to run marketing campaign to acquire users on the platform(currently we have 212 on database)- the amount will be split in half to be spent in six months. Half will be used for social media campaigns, the other half for on campus studenst engagements.
The goal for R60 000.00. Should we reach this goal, R46 000.00 will be used to settle the developers for the challenge portal, the remaining R14 000.00 for user acquisition as explained above.
We are team of motivated individuals, backed by The Innovation Hub and House4Hack.
Founder: Dimakatjo Maila
Education: BSc Microbiology, PGD Enterprise Development
Experience: 6 Years Work Experience
Developer: Jovanni Noudt
Operations: Grant Makhathini