On 8th June, 2023, Dr. Joy Kiiru, Research and Innovation Technical Advisor at the Research and Innovation Systems from Africa (RISA), the funder of the IoT and AI Incubation hub project visited the incubation hub and appreciated the progress made so far.

The main objective of the visit was to hear pitches of the innovations that are being incubated and assess the project implementation progress.

‘IoT and AI Applied Research Results Commercialization through Incubation Hub’ project aims at establishing an Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) based applied research incubator which is expected to facilitate the transfer of applied research prototypes and knowledge from IoT lab to market and commercialization through academia-industry collaboration.

During her visit, Dr. Kiiru interacted with 20 pre-incubators being supported through the hub and heard their pitches.

After pitching, pre-incubators were provided with comments to finetune their ideas. “You have to think big to ensure your ideas are new or have some added value to existing ones to be a marketable new solution to existing challenges,” she urged.

Dr. Joy Kiiru appreciated the progress and urged the Centre to invest in more effort to help pre-incubators come up with viable ideas. A $326,000 grant secured for the project will be used to buy equipment for the incubation hub and help the trainees to develop their AI and IoT-based solutions and avail them on the market.

It is expected that by the end of project, at least 24 prototypes will be developed and eight solutions commercialized, ready to respond to problems society has.