Since 2011

Kolba Lab’s innovation challenge on human rights brought together individuals and groups with innovative ideas towards advancing human rights, access to justice and the rule of law. The underlying message is that human rights cannot flourish through government action alone. Citizens must work together with government to ensure that all of society benefits from human rights reforms and to ensure that these reforms are being implemented. Prototyped solutions included Accessibility map for PwD and a Digital Map of Police Violence.

How can we increase communication channels or feedback loops between learners and teachers? Kolba has crowdsourced a call for ideas to incubate cutting edge solutions in education. Prototypes included online Chess School, Arvest arts board game and an industry-connected research platform.

How can we make our healthcare services more user-oriented? Kolba Lab has crowdsourced a call for innovative technological solutions to address healthcare issues in Armenia. Prototyped solutions included a mobile app for kids with autism disorder, a web calculator for state-subsidized healthcare services and an app connecting doctors and patients.

The #CreateTogether Hackathon brought innovators, technologists, entrepreneurs and creatives to Armenia from all around the world. The marathon coding event was a meetup of like-minded hackers and non-hackers alike intended to transform ideas into reality via mobile and web apps, services and products! The Hackathon coined partnerships with the CreateTogether team – a Silicon Valley based HyeTech community, Microsoft Innovation Center in Armenia and PicsArt.

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The very first social ventures supported by Kolba Lab included Seeing Hands – a massage salon, which employs people with sight disorders as massage therapists; TaTa Kindergarten – a new solution in child care to address the needs of working mothers and Byurakan Chir – dry food social enterprise in the highlands of Armenia.

Incubation of Social Start-ups

Active participants, inspiring facilitators, fantastic ideas, enthusiasm, fun, networking, all in one place called Mardamej: SICamp Reload. Six teams have competed for Mardamej Anticorruption Awards prototyping solutions like Virtual Blood Bank for Armenia and IMngo kindergarten application.

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Social Innovation Camp brings together ideas, people and digital tools to build web-based solutions to real life social problems – all in just 48 hours. These ideas challenge conventional wisdom and create new tech-enabled models for solving social problems. Prototyped solutions included TaghInfo hyperlocal news platform and I-Like peer-to-peer services map.

Much untapped expertise is locked up within the realms of public servants in countries like Armenia. In order for public servants to experiment alongside citizens, three rounds of internal idea challenges were carried out in the Prime Minister’s office, Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Education. Public servant generated policy startups include a unified citizen request platform, e-admission system for schools and a careerlab to bridge academia with the employment market.

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UNDP invited UK’s leading FutureGov agency to carry a “hands-on” workshop for changemakers within government bureaucracy. Participants from the Ministries of Justice and Territorial Administration, Prime Minister’s secretariat and municipalities, learned about the value of collaborative design processes and applied ethnographic design research; analysis of insights, communicating and interacting with users; development of ideas, prototyping and testing with service users to a real-life problem the government is trying to tackle.

Government services tend to be designed and delivered from the top down. With its crowdsourced innovation challenge, Kolba has created opportunities for citizens to change their relationships with local government and to co-design public services with the local governments. Solutions included a new platform for condominium management, an online map of public transportation and solar lightening in backyards of Gyumri.

When you think of public governance process, what do you think of? The perceptions can be a bit of a ‘black box’ that we invite you to open! We believe that the shift to information technology, open data and smart analytics in business industries has power to improve governance processes. That’s why we explored how best practices from business and tech industries can be applied in public governance, what changes can we expect, and how policymakers and citizens should respond.

On October 28, 2015, the global forum of the Open Government Partnership initiative kicked off in Mexico City. Armenia participated for the first time in the competition and won a top award among the countries of the Asian-South Pacific region. Armenia came up with the “Creation and introduction of community management and development-oriented information systems in regional administrations” initiative. A program referred to as “Smart community” (Smart Municipality) is meant to increase efficiency in the activities of Armenia’s local self-governance authorities and improve public services based on the principles open governance.

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We organized a future modeling/foresight session in the field of tourism for Lori region. The session was led by Skolkovo School of Management specialists, and it was based on the same methodology as in “Atlas of Emerging Jobs” research. The aim of the session was to foresee the future profession changes taking into account the potential of the region.

The topic for Tavush region was high value agricultural products and food processing. In result of three-day intensive discussions and hard work the participants ended up creating several scenarios for the future of Tavush. We will continue working on making the best scenarios into reality.

Kolba Lab used the Creative Game (Systemic Thought Activity) model to generate scenarios for future governance models.

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