AE4H Innovation Lab 2019

The ‘innovation lab’ is a non-traditional workshop format wherein participants focus more on what they want to do next and how they might work together rather than on sharing past results. Deep discussions in small groups are a feature. These are invite-only events that feature a highly diverse set of participants (expertise, nationality, age, gender, etc.). The 2019 event represents our second full-scale innovation lab.

Innovation Lab 2019

The Second Innovation Lab (June 19 - June 22, 2019) was held at the Balsillie School of International Affairs (BSIA), Waterloo, Ontario, led by AE4H in co-operation with KIT, Germany and Oxford University, UK. With a focus on Africa’s Energy Revolution. The event featured innovation lab participants discussed cleantech entrepreneurship in Africa. This event was also a part of the TrueNorth Festival, the largest annual gathering of tech leaders in Canada's technology triangle.

52 members of the AE4H consortium representing 18 countries attended the 2019 AE4H Innovation Lab, to meet and discuss solutions to energy access. This Innovation Lab was a forum for true innovation – instead of being passive listeners, participants were challenged to actively contribute to new ideas to scale and improve the provision of global energy access. The purpose of the Innovation Lab was to leverage the expertise of the dynamic and diverse experts in the room to create tangible energy access solutions.

Through the Innovation Lab, participants first went through a series of brainstorming exercises to ascertain the most pressing energy access challenges of the day. They then self-arranged into diverse groups and developed the basis for a solution to one of the brainstormed challenges. These solutions were then developed further for several months after the end of the Innovation Lab, into a series of Innovation Briefs that outline the structure and merit of the proposed solutions. The Briefs outline current problems and solutions regarding energy access, and represent the strong global collaboration and commitment from AE4H members to ensure affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy for all.

Objectives

The goal was to produce a set of working papers that outlined follow-up activities which advance off-grid energy innovation to support key end user needs/energy services, including:

1. Business services

2. Agriculture

3. Electric cooking

4.Electric mobility

5. Education & public health

6. Clean water access

7. Communications & entertainment

8. Heating & cooling

Outcome of the Innovation Lab 2019

An outcome of the 2019 AE4H innovation lab was a deep desire to collaborate with partners to create energy solutions for some of the world’s most vulnerable. Dr. Jatin Nathwani, in partnership with many key AE4H members, created a proposal for the MacArthur Foundation’s 100&Change competition, which provides one project with $100 million USD to fund a project for global benefit.

AE4H’s proposal, titled ‘Mending Broken Lives through Clean Energy Solutions’, proposed to provide electricity and energy services for basic necessities in refugee settlements in northern Uganda. The installed systems and mechanisms would be used as a foundation for global scalability of energy access systems and building human capacity for positive change.

Although it was not selected as the recipient of the $100 million, Mending Broken Lives through Clean Energy Solutions was ranked as one of the top 100 proposals in the 100&Change competition, adding WISE and its partners to the Lever for Change network with great potential for further partnerships and projects.