SINGA Business Lab

SINGA Business Lab is an inclusive incubator that enables refugees and immigrants to turn their entrepreneurial ideas into successful businesses.

Berlin has recently become a global entrepreneurial hub where a world-class ecosystem is creating technologies that might shape our world in the years to come. However, this startup scene has remained predominantly homogeneous and inaccessible to the vast majority of newcomers (refugees and immigrants) in Germany. Newcomers face high levels of unemployment in Germany, as their educations and qualifications are not recognized by the German labor system. Entrepreneurship is a large opportunity, as people can prove themselves through the quality of their work. Additionally, the best innovations come from diverse backgrounds and experiences, and so expanding the accessibility of Berlin's start-up ecosystem will also foment new innovation.

The solution we are proposing

We believe that entrepreneurship enables newcomers to proactively participate in shaping the work of the future. We have created a flexible solution that empowers and enables refugees and immigrants to be active players in the tech scene in Berlin, to become a driving force of innovation.

This solution accommodates a community of aspiring entrepreneurs and helps marginalized people build sustainable profitable businesses by providing them with access to top-notch entrepreneurial education. We have used a user-centric design methods to create an entrepreneurial program.

Our proof of concept consisted of two cohorts, each lasted for several months. The first cohort was a pilot program (Mar 2017 - July 2017). The outcome of that cohort was establishing 3 startups in Germany out of the 5 that completed the program. Some of which went on to raise angel investment, created MVP, made their first hire and first sale and are building core customer bases. Seven entrepreneurs joined the second cohort that started in November 2017 and ended when the entrepreneurs presented their 6 MVPs on the Demo Day in May 2018.  One of the entrepreneurs who is building a deep-tech IoT children safety solution has attracted much attention in Berlin's start-up scene.

How the solution changes the world

We aim to create positive changes on three different levels

• Individual level (economic empowerment): by enabling marginalized newcomers to create sustainable businesses and become providers of jobs instead of being left behind in an ever-changing job market.

• Societal level (structural change): we aim to make the entrepreneurial ecosystem more inclusive, increasing accessibility and enabling a more dynamic, innovative scene.

• Global level: by creating and sharing success stories, we aim to shift the narrative surrounding migration by showing that refugees and migrants aren’t a burden, but rather a valuable opportunity.

SINGA Business Lab proposes a new process for solving the challenge of the work of the future. SBL uses an innovative incubation methodology, following the same content and structure that you would normally find in any start-up incubator but rather than following a strict schedule, SBL uses a community concept that fits with the challenges of our target participants.

We realize that technology is constantly shifting and changing the way we operate our lives and the way we do business. This is why we provide workshops, education and invite professional mentors that touch upon and can guide our participants on the use of technology in business such as digital marketing, digital strategy and digital optimization. For our entrepreneurs that come in with a tech based idea such as IoT or AI based ideas, we connect them with the relevant parties that can make their project materialize.

Our goal for the next 12 months is to be able to, through the entrepreneurial community concept, to launch 20 new small businesses through our incubation program. A second goal is to have between 60 to 80 active participating entrepreneurs in our ongoing workshops, and those would eventually go on to launch their own businesses.

Through a network/community effect, we aim to impact a larger portion of the population in Germany. By providing quality entrepreneurial education and a vibrant network of entrepreneurs and mentors, we aim to spread the word of mouth through success stories and impactful ideas, that can then scale to reach a larger population and other cities.

Online Marketing Outreach through social networks and through targeted outreach to certain communities, neighborhoods and localities in Berlin

The solution will be accessible through our website where participants and members of the community can create a profile online at any time and then from there register to the different available workshops that would be on offer in the upcoming months. Our business model is built on inclusiveness, and therefore participation in a workshop is not contingent on meeting any criteria, but solely on the participant’s interest in entrepreneurship.

We have launched 11 businesses in the past and continue to provide them with support and mentorship through our network. They have been mostly from the refugee community who have been forced to relocate to Germany because of political and social disadvantages. These 11 entrepreneurs have completed our designated track and have gone on to start their own businesses; some of which through our services, have managed to gather interest from investors and the wider community. Others have managed to develop their skills and launch their own craftsman practices and were able to market them to the public.

Our work requires a balance of three different skillsets – understanding entrepreneurship and the start-up mindset, how to work productively and inclusively with disadvantaged communities, and how to communicate our work to gain public support. Our core team has this skillset, with an ex-McKinsey manager, social media expert, and members of the refugee community. We also receive the support of many volunteer experts and mentors that work with the refugees to drive the impact of our work. Additionally, we are part of the international SINGA network of NGOs with many experts in various topics related to our work.

The core of our work is supporting people to create businesses, and this is also what positions us for long-term sustainability. As our community of entrepreneurs grow and we launch businesses together with them, the successful businesses will pay back into the program with an agreed percentage of their profits over a set amount of time. We will have a small loan fund to provide entrepreneurs with seed capital, which they then pay back into the program. This sets us up to be self-sustaining once we reach a critical mass of businesses. It is also a model that allows us to scale nationally, with an open-source methodology that can be replicated easily internationally.

We believe SOLVE global community can help us develop our solution and transform the insights we get from our entrepreneurial community into more advanced entrepreneurial programmes, which has the potential to scale and be replicated in other European cities to drive structural change. Moreover, we hope to get access to insights, workshops, seminars on start-of-the-art research that identifies best practices to create entrepreneurial community that helps underprivileged people move up the ranks in society.

• We do not have the ability to accurately measure the long-term systemic-level social and economic impact of our solution using rigorous scientific methodologies. We hope to tap into SOLVE network of researchers and institutions to find effective methods to analyze the outcomes of our work. Furthermore, we aspire to evaluate the impact our program has on its partners and the larger entrepreneurial ecosystem more robustly.