Sparkprize

Creating Success – Building Belief

The SparkPrize vision is to empower city communities by:

• first, creating a successful high-profile start-up company from scratch, and then
  
  
• building belief within the city’s entrepreneurs that they can do the same.
  

SparkPrize for Urban Development

For the first time in history more than half the world’s people live in cities, with over 90 percent of urban growth occurring in the developing world.

As such, the development of these cities and their communities has become a critical factor in both social and economic growth, as well as global competitiveness, for national economies.

As the flagship program from The Future Cities Institute, SparkPrize meets these challenges of urban development through the collaborative establishment of a vibrant industry ecosystem that supports entrepreneurial growth and software enabled innovation for industries within a city economy.

Key Impacts

As city’s greatest asset is its people. To mobilise their potential and deliver to the vision, SparkPrize develops three things within them:

• Confidence: creating new ideas and opportunities
  
  
• Connections: connecting them to local and global resources and ecosystems
  
  
• Capabilities: empowering them with new skills, tools and channels to market

SparkPrize Mission: Guaranteed Success

Empowerment and belief for people comes from seeing success, therefore we have created a world-class team that guarantees success through the SparkPrize Program that:

• uncovers new ideas and opportunities for entrepreneurs
  
  
• creates new start-up companies
  
  
• incubates, trains and mentors these start-ups to market success
  
  
• connects their success to local and global markets
  
  
• illustrate a clear pathway that others can follow to duplicate success

Empowering and Inspiring

Implementing and showcasing the successful impact of SparkPrize will build people’s belief systems, empower local communities and drive city economic and social growth. A critical success factor to this outcome is the establishment of collaborative partnerships that includes all elements of the local innovation ecosystem.

This includes industry, government, academia and those organisations and individuals focusing on urban development, technology start-ups, entrepreneurship and innovation. For this reason, not only does The Futures Cities Institute bring its experience and practices in facilitating innovation, but it also brings a vibrant and global partner ecosystem to the city environment to ensure the establishment of a sustainable innovation system in the local economy.

As such, the SparkPrize for Urban Development Program provides a ‘plug-and-play’ opportunity for cities to kick start knowledge-based industries and software-enabled innovation, starting with urban development, and then flowing to other industries such as agriculture, tourism, finance, etc.