Dimensions of Projects Incubation from a Value Perspective

The topic for the first Round Table for 2023 was ‘Projects incubation and value creation: From Ideas to Action’.

On February 28, 2023, the Fab City Foundation organised its first Round Table aimed at presenting a general overview of value-generated projects and their ecosystems. We invited three experts to deliver talks on the topic; Cesar Jung-Harada, Anna Sera Lowe, and Guillem Camprodon. It was an active session with 35 unique interactions from 73 event attendees.

In addition, the event deepened the discussion around the Fab City Full Stack, our framework that helps to interpret the Fab City challenge towards 2054. This first Round Table focused on Layer 3 of the Full Stack: “Incubating Value-Generating Projects”.

Key Learnings

How do ideas become successful value-generated projects? 

As Guillem presented, Fab labs like Fab Lab Barcelona provide the tools, resources, and knowledge from their extensive work with community projects to help incubate projects in various areas such as food technology, education, design, and agriculture. 

By engaging Fab Labs in your communities, you access the materials and expertise to transition from ideas to projects.

What are key factors to incentivise social and entrepreneurial projects that strengthen the principles of the Fab City Global Initiative? 

“…the small things that we do in our neighbourhood participate to a bigger picture” – Cesar Jung-Harada

From Cesar’s talk, he highlights that projects can be activated further when they solve local community problems before new concepts or innovations are introduced, uses available local resources, and form partnerships with local organisations and NGOs.

How to design value-generated projects be sustainable in the long term? What are the frameworks, methods, and business and financing models that support the development and utilisation of innovation projects?

Gleaning from Anna’s experience in building startups within the European and African contexts, incorporating these strategies into your project sets it up to generate funding and be sustainable; 

• Training around membership. 
• Space rental.
• Production of products for sale to help meet running costs of community makerspaces. 

Developing and sustaining value-generating projects involves time and adaptation of different strategies like those highlighted during this round table. To delve deeper into the discussion, watch YouTube Video. If you would like to access the resources from the round table, look here.

Join us in the next round table on May 30, 2023 where we will exchange on the topic of ‘Applying Bioregional Development’.