Startup Weekend Barbados is a 3-day event comprised of workshops, mentoring, startup business support and a software hackathon, where individuals and teams of entrepreneurs, innovators and software developers will be coached through the creation of a new business enterprise and respond to the needs of local and regional businesses by developing a software solution that solves a problem identified by the participating business enterprises.The focus of this event will be the encouragement of innovation and entrepreneurship using ICT leading to the establishment of new business enterprises and creation and testing of software applications with demonstrable commercial appeal.The Hackathon will seek to address national challenges by solving problems across a range of industry sectors including:
Business Process Enhancement
Healthcare
Cultural Industries
Consumerism
Automotive Innovation
Challenges
Teams may select from one of the following challenges to produce their application:
Business Process Enhancement: How can the process of business registration be streamlined/enhanced to reduce the current level of friction between multiple departments involved in the company registration process, improve efficiency and customer service?
Healthcare: As a country that values its human capital, Barbados is committed to providing social healthcare to most of its citizens. Amid this backdrop, there is an ever increasing rate of chronic non-communicable diseases, poor preventative medicine/early detection and a generally low medical research agenda. In addition to the generally expensive nature of providing healthcare, the aforementioned conditions represent a constant challenge to healthcare administrators and national finance managers. Create an application that can be utilised to help the local healthcare system encourage early self diagnosis and early detection, facilitate expanded research and generally improve the health reporting.
Cultural Industries: From the Crop Over festival to our UNESCO World Heritage status, slave huts and many local traditions, Barbados is an island with a rich, vibrant culture and a strong heritage. Barbados is also a country that relies on tourism as our primary foreign exchange earner and with cultural exchange being a key component of tourism, it is often lamented that sufficient is not done to celebrate, expose and integrate local culture into our tourism product. Create an application that positively highlights Barbados’ culture in a way that celebrates our local heritage and enhances and promotes our national tourism product in a manner that allows for the enhanced commercialisation of our culture.
Consumerism: How can Barbadian consumers and the public sector Ministries and regulatory agencies that support them, facilitate better data collection and information sharing in a way that measurably empowers consumers to make better choices, rate business performance and directly impact our national business landscape?
Automotive Innovation: Given the number of vehicles on the Barbados roads and the extent to which the automotive industry impacts our foreign exchange, how can Barbados use ICT to spark innovation in the automotive sector in a way that could lead to the country being a net earner from this industry?
