Larger companies are clamouring to collaborate with startups working on next generation models that will disrupt industries. Startups also seek opportunities to collaborate with industry leaders who can help take their products to market faster. Everyone needs space.
Collaboration occurs when people or organizations work together to achieve common goals, sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus. Sri Lanka is now seeing a number of organizations using their own resources to grow the competitiveness of the respective industries. Firms that locate in these collaborative workspaces benefit from the experience, resources and even funding at times.
WEARABLE TECH COLLABORATION
MAS Innovation
Foster Lane, Colombo 10
MAS Holding’s, Sri Lanka’s large st readymade clothes maker’s newest unit MAS Innovation embodies the company’s passion to create value by focusing on its customer’s likely needs in the future.
MAS Innovation is exploring innovative solutions around apparel, fashion and lifestyle products, like for instance the silicon-embedded (wearable) technology its now working on.
MAS Innovation essentially is two units. The first peruse innovation around apparel for the company’s current and future clients. In another initiative, MAS Innovation has opened its office to startups that want to collaborate with them to work on big ideas. MAS is open to funding, providing technical know-how, space to operate from and access to manufacturing and developers for firms at its incubator.
MAS isn’t looking to commercialise startups, but to filter them and to add value by providing access to know-how on structure and business models. Its focus areas are technology, e-commnerce, wearable tech and healthcare businesses that want to take their products to market.
“We’ll give them access to space, designers, sourcing and manufacturing plants and legal and finance help. All we ask in return is a certain small percentage of the business, 10-20% max. The entrepreneur remain the controlling shareholder,” explains Amrah Akbar, MAS Innovation’s Chief Financial Officer.
The defining feature of the office is the open space that’s interaction, communication and collaboration friendly. Bleachers that can seat up to 100 people can be used as an auditorium or gymnasium for presentations and seminars, while smaller booths and boardrooms are available for meetings. The accelerator project room/s serves as a place where startups can collaborate with MAS and outside parties such as investors, creating networks and driving ideas.
GREAT MINDS, ONE LOCATION
TRACE Tripoli Expert City
Maradana, Colombo 10
Once a hanger in the railway goods-shed yard at Maradana, the complex called the Tripoli market was dilapidated and disused. After some sprucing up it was being used for community programs. Today, it is a marketplace of a different sort.
The facility, which is now a modern open plan office complex was renovated and adapted by the government and now houses some of the island’s most innovative technology firms.
Its new tenants have created TRACE Tripoli Expert City, a technology campus that is also sustainable because of the creative way the previously discarded space has been brought back to life. The ‘expert city’ tenants include CodeGen International, Calcey Technologies, WSO2 and telco Mobitel. The concentration of talent and ideas has made TRACE is already a location where robotics workshops, hackathons and tech related events are held. For the firms located there these events are opportunities to showcase technology they are working on and attract talent.
CodeGen, a tech firm based at TRACE, builds products around their core competency travel software solutions. Somehow it has extended this to include the next big things in transportation. Its most exciting undertaking is an electric supercar under development by a team based at TRACE.
CHAMPION OF DESIGNERS
Riot House
www.riothouse.lk
(a virtual space)
The term ‘zine’ was widely used in the early 1970s for small circulation, self-published design work. Sri Lanka’s first zine called ‘Riot Minds’ is a design-focused mini magazine that showcases design work.
Riot Minds is an A2-size coloured poster filled with designs, photographs and text by various designers, folded into an A5-size pamphlet that can fit in a pocket. It’s like a mini portfolio of designers.
Riot Minds is the face of Riot House, a design incubator that is also as an agent for designers. Artists that showcase their work on the zine are automatically added into Riot House’s portfolio, which enables them to find work. Founder and Riot House Curator Chani Perera uses her experience, expertise and contacts to find designers specifically suited for each job. “The enthusiasm we’ve got from all has been inspiring,” Chani says.
Riot Minds is open to industry veterans, as well as first-time artists. More often, the designers who send in work are not those who have sorted themselves in the industry, but ones struggling to find their way. Riot House strives to grow the confidence of designers by including them on the zine. Riot Minds is ultimately designers expressing their opinions and ideologies.
Riot House began with the idea of elevating design standards and growing self-confidence of designers. Often designers are their own harshest critics so they hold out till a work is perfect. Perfections is subjective. Perera is adamant designers sending work in for Riot Minds stick to deadlines and work together to ensure a high-quality publication every month. Stemming from her own interest in combining journalism and design, Perera also hopes to trigger design authorship and encourage a conversation about the local design sphere through the zine. “The conversation always revolves around, why we can’t do good quality work. Riot Minds is a small outlet for this frustration,” she explains. Riot Minds is distributed free to subscribers monthly.
Chani Perera lives by the phrase ‘If you don’t see what you want, create it yourself ’. Although design studios exist in more evolved markets, there are only a few options available in Sri Lanka. Design graduates have only three avenues – joining the advertising industry, freelance designing or leaving the country. Designers need to focus more on constantly designing and creating rather than managing PR work and publications. Riot House is her solution to this challenge.
According to Perera, designers often find their work is being stolen, or intellectual property damaged. By curating the entire creative process, Riot House hopes to avoid the misuse of talent, and benefit both the designer and the client through mutual agreement.
GOOD FOR THE ENVIRONMENT
Good Market
Pop up market at Racecourse,
Colombo 07
The Good Market brings together people with varied businesses and fro m different backgrounds to pro mote Sri Lankan made products and services that are good for health, benefits communities and the environment. It’s a pop up market held every Saturday along side the Racecourse shopping complex in Colombo.
The Good Market is also a collaborative space for socially and environmentally responsible producers, services providers and consumers.
The Good Market sells only organic food. In early 2013, Good Market producers and consumers set up the Good Market Organic Participatory Guarantee System (PGS) based on international organic standards. An organic PGS process means that an independent inspector from an accredited certifying agency visits the farm and verifies that the farmer is following organic practices. International organic certification is expensive and economically insensible for small farmers here. Good Market led certification is far more affordable and accessible. Farmers have to follow organic practices for a year at least to be able to participate in the PGS. The aim is to keep costs low and make make organic food accessible to all.
Based on the organic PGS, the Good Market is also starting a Fair Trade PGS. This means that all arts and handicraft vendors at the Good Market focused on creating a social and environmental impact by offering better trading conditions so workers can improve can highlight this contribution they make to communities.
Because it promotes local products from locally available resources like vegan and sugar-free food in jars from Soul Food, to garments made out of fabric waste, the Good Market encourages people to create helps people make better choices for the planet, for communities and their health.