It is our duty to support public policy and encourage students and aspiring entrepreneurs to give digital entrepreneurship a try, Alex Borg, manager of the Mita Innovation Hub, says.
What do you do differently at the Mita Innovation Hub?
We’re an early stage incubator that offers aspiring start-up founders the opportunity to validate and test their business idea, specialise in a niche area, and then go on to transform it into a deployable product or service.
Our emphasis is on early stage because we want to focus on the creation of credible teams.
These can gain an amazing level of confidence once they actually create their own first product, even if it still does not have a market, or possibly only one customer – government.
In fact, we started off with the notion of defining a problem – or customer pain point – for the teams which they then have to solve through apps. The Park Majjistral, Tarxien temples and very soon an urban development planning app are all firsts for Malta.
Through their products and Mita’s endorsement, these start-ups can showcase themselves and use their newly acquired talent to ideate further and hopefully develop a better product, gain a second and then a third customer.
Of course, it’s very tough to productise and go global, but we hope that with our work we are complementing the good work that is being done by other incubators such as Takeoff and Microsoft Innovation Centre, which are probably better equipped to help start-ups with more polished and globally viable products.
Why has Mita engaged in this new initiative which seems to differ substantially from its core business of delivering ICT projects and services to the public sector?
A 2012 European Commission entrepreneurship survey revealed that we Maltese have a fear of personal failure when starting a business that is twice the average for EU citizens. I’m not saying that we are not entrepreneurial, but we probably come from a traditional brick-and-mortar entrepreneurial culture.
Digital technologies have now opened a world of opportunities that do not require a huge investment to start off and test a digitally-enabled idea on the market. ICT is now powering everything. In Malta it contributes five per cent to GDP when you consider only statistics about ICT enterprises – in reality there is much more than that when you consider that digital technologies drive huge contributors to national GDP such as i-gaming, financial services, tourism and maritime.
As Malta’s agency responsible for ICT, we think it is our duty to support public policy and encourage students and aspiring tech entrepreneurs to give digital entrepreneurship a try. It will also serve them well even if they fail in their venture - it is only by failing that you can learn to do it better next time.
The MITA Innovation Hub seems to be a less high profile incubator in the local scene. Is this by intent?
True, you hear less about our Innovation Hub than you do about Takeoff or the Microsoft Innovation Centre. There are various reasons for that. We are a small incubator with only one full-timer running it. That’s because MITA is involved in so many fronts, that you hear more about all the many other things MITA does, than the Innovation Hub. In reality since we started launching our calls for start-ups, in just over one year we’ve received nearly 40 applications, out of which we chose only the best seven or eight start-ups.
As a government agency – and all government organisations worldwide are risk-averse as they have to be careful how they use taxpayers’ money – we tend to be a bit frugal. This could explain why we emphasise feasibility of the solution with respect to business viability. In fact till now, most business ideas were channelled towards solving a defined problem for a government or institutional customer.
But we have already started changing that. In the last startAPP 2.0 challenge we asked the start-ups to define the problem that they want to solve for their identified customer segment as long as they use satellite data provided by the European Space Agency.
In our next accelerator call, soon due, we will fund up to three start-ups proposing any digitally-enabled business idea as long as they can demonstrate it is viable.
What are your future plans?
Our plan is to embark on an accelerator programme that will fund up to 45 start-ups in the coming five years. That’s nearly €1 million as we will make available a pre-seed investment of €22,000 to each start-up with the best idea. We plan to organise two yearly intakes of start-ups that will go through a fast track accelerator programme.
This will start with ideation and design thinking sessions, and then continue beyond selection and pitching with an intensive design-and-build phase during which the start-ups will have to deploy their prototype and test it in the Maltese market, before attempting the next big leap globally.
What will you focus on?
As we have done quite experimentally in the past year, the calls or requests for start-ups will probably be thematic identifying a particular challenge as we did with the satellite data. We might also try to direct interest to particular areas which could be relevant to Malta. These could be verticals such as fintech or health, as well as more horizontal areas such as augmented reality, big data and internet-of-things. But it’s probably too early to determine at this stage. In our next call, we will once again be asking for ideas to develop interactive digital learning tools. There will always be a place for themes to support national ICT policy.
We also plan to widen our mentor network and create linkages with world renowned accelerators, and hopefully explore better funding opportunities. Currently we are a zero-equity accelerator, but eventually things may change.
This article first appeared in the Zest supplement carried in The Sunday Times of Malta.