Digital Jersey has teamed up with Jersey Coders and Technovation, a global technology entrepreneurship program for young women, to run a 12-week technology competition for women in Jersey. This competition is part of the global Technovation Challenge, one of the world’s largest and longest running technology competitions for women.
Digital Jersey will be the Regional Ambassador for Technovation Jersey, Channel Islands and alongside Jersey Coders empower girls to use technology to make the world a better place. The Technovation Challenge also encourages entrepreneurship and innovation among young women by presenting technology in a new light and emphasising its potential social impact.
The theme of The Technovation Challenge is “solve a problem in your local community”. Teams of women will work to identify a chosen problem, create an app to solve it, build a company to launch their app in the market, and finally pitch their plan to the technical experts. The women will meet each week to cover a range of business topics including competitive analysis, promotion and revenue streams, and the basics of coding. Business professionals and technical experts from Jersey coders will mentor the teams.
The top six schools involved in the competition from around the world will have the opportunity to travel to San Francisco to compete at the Technovation World Pitch in June 2015.
Carla Harris, Operations Director at Digital Jersey commented: “We are very excited to be involved in such a great competition that encourages young women to get involved and learn not only technical skills but very important life skills to help them succeed in their career, whether it be in the digital sector or other fields. Our goal is to inspire and support girls and women to become creators and innovators, become technology entrepreneurs and develop a mobile app prototype that solves a real problem in our local community”
Rob Dudley, Tech Mentor at Jersey Coders commented: "The 2015 Technovation Challenge represents a fantastic opportunity for the island's young women to demonstrate their entrepreneurial, business and technical skills to a global audience as well as show-casing Jersey as a community that is working hard to break down the gender stereotype so often seen in the tech world as demonstrated both by the participants and the high quality and experience of mentors and organisers."
We'd also like to take this opportunity to say a big thank you to Jersey Telecoms for supplying mobile phones to Jersey Coders for the Technovation Challenge teams to use.
