King’s College hosts first Impact Week

An entrepreneurship and innovation-focused non-profit programme called ‘Impact Week’ kicked-off for the first time in Nepal.
Hosted by King’s College in Kathmandu in collaboration with Germany’s Lufthansa Group Airlines, the Impact Week is conducted in two phases. In the first phase, seven European experts coached 18 Nepali academic professionals and 18 international professionals about the ‘design thinking’ methodology.
Similarly, in the second phase, the trained Junior Coaches guide about 120 students and young professionals from diverse colleges and field of studies through a design thinking process to solve pressing local and national level challenges.
At the end of the Impact Week, all the 18 teams will pitch their final solutions and compete for three awards in the form of financial aid directed specifically meant to support the teams to implement their solutions.
Alongside the support of Lufthansa’s social arm – help alliance – and the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Kathmandu, representatives from various European multinational companies have come together to bring this global event to Nepal.
The Impact Week in Nepal is organised by a team of volunteers from Lufthansa Systems including the lead organisers Aman Bhattarai and Tilo Hillmer, and the lead coach Danny Tobisch. They are experts in their respective fields with a rich background of participating in Impact Week programmes around the world.
The German ambassador to Nepal Roland Schäfer, on the occasion, expressed his admiration for the changing outlook of Nepal in the global scenario, from a country known for its beautiful mountain-ranges to becoming a country working on finding innovative solutions to its problems, which encourages development based on ideation and technological advancements.
“Knowledge and skills are the most precious things that are needed to foster Nepal’s economic and social development,” senior consultant at zeroG – a Lufthansa Group company – and lead organiser of the Impact Week Kathmandu Aman Bhattarai said, adding that he is excited to welcome global innovation experts, my colleagues from the Lufthansa Group and their skills and methodologies to Kathmandu and hope to foster user-centric social innovation growth among Nepali youths through this unique collaboration.
“This event based on design-thinking approach towards solving real problems posed by the organisations in Nepal, engages the young minds of Nepali students and professionals in the process and is an initiative towards ideating innovative solutions to our problems in a collaborative manner,” executive director of King’s College Narottam Aryal said.
Overall, the programme facilitates participants to connect with like-minded people from Kathmandu valley and around the world, to learn from both the experts and each other, and to create a real impact for their community and country. It contributes towards promoting innovation and entrepreneurship in emerging economies as the basis for sustainable growth.
With the help of the design thinking method, local students and young professionals are empowered to develop the business ideas of their own and solutions to solve problems in their local or wider community. This German award-winning program was established in 2015 in Kenya and has been successfully held in various emerging economies across the world. This year’s locations include India, Jordan, Ghana and Nepal.

Nepal needs product diversification

Experts and business leaders said that Nepal's global trade is suffering due to lack of product diversification.
Addressing a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signing ceremony between King's College and Demola – an international innovation challenge platform – in Kathmandu today, managing director (MD) of Safal Partners Ashutosh Tiwari said that the main problem of Nepali market is that traders and manufacturers are failing to diversify their productions. Citing example of handicraft business, he said that there is lot of potential for bringing creativity. “However, we are not utilising it,” he said, adding that Nepal needs to design sense for this.
“In economics, we talk about capital and technology for businesses,” he said, “However, we need more than that, we need productivity in work and complexity in design to compete in the global market.”
Also speaking at the programme, director of Jyoti Group Saurabh Jyoti said that the knowledge provided to students is not helping to bring innovations in corporate and business houses. “This is becoming a big problem for us,” he added.
Likewise, head of cooperation and counselor at Finnish Embassy in Kathmandu Kati Bhose, on the occasion, opined that education has to focus on research to create human resources as per today's demand. “The new changes that are surfacing in the world has not only been impacting the industries but the entire social environment,” she said, adding that it takes a new set of thinking, which is only possible by the collaboration between universities and the industrial sector to solve such problems.
“Demola invites companies as well as organisations and students to work jointly on their problems starting from problem identification to solution development,” Educational Designer of King’s College Udgum Khadka, said. “While doing so, academia gradually earns the trust of companies and brings them closer, and companies realise the potential of students even before they graduate.”
The learnings and insights during the process will be an invaluable repository of knowledge and information for Nepali academia and industries and organizations,” he added.
With the signing of MoU with the Finnish platform, King's College has become a partner of Demola in Nepal. Demola is a Finland-based global innovation challenge platform that has entered Nepal through a partnership with King’s College.
“With this agreement, we have the capability to strengthen international networks and bring co-creation tools to Nepali companies and society,” vice president of Demola Global Pekka Silvén said, on the occasion.
During the event, five different institutions including Annapurna Media Network, Young Innovations, City Planning Commission of Kathmandu Metropolitan City, Katha Nepal and M&S NEXT Venture Corp signed the agreement to join Demola as the Challenge Partners.
“King’s as an academic institute, which has always believed that learning should not be limited to the concrete classrooms and prescribed syllabi,” the president of King’s College Narottam Aryal said, adding that the college sees Demola as a tool capable of stitching an existing gap between Nepali education,  institutions and companies as well as government and non-government organisations. “Being a globally recognised Finnish co-creation platform, we expect Demola’s concept to nudge forward the culture of joint problem-solving in Nepal.”
Demola facilitates eight-week long projects where students and company experts work jointly on an innovation challenge, as set by the company as well as organizations. The collaboration will take place from problem identification phase to solution development phase.
According to the King’s College, there are two additional elements to the Demola Project: Demola Facilitators and Universities. While Demola Facilitators will bring about the global knowledge and insights in solving a particular problem of a company, organisations or helping them advance with the introduction of innovation, the university will try to apply the tested and proven academic theories, to help Nepali businesses and organisations reach further heights.
Demola innovation challenges have already brought together over 50 universities, 750,000 students and the leading companies from around the world. Currently, it operates in 16 countries including Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Spain, France, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary, Portugal, Mexico, Namibia, South Africa, Japan and China. Nepal is the 17th country to introduce Demola concept.

King’s College to host province-level International Conference in Dhangadhi

King’s College announced the hosting of its third annual international conference on entrepreneurship, 'Entrepreneurship and Economic Growth in Federal Nepal' in Dhangadi of Sudur Paschim province.
While the conference to be held on November 22-24 is a continuation of its annual trend that began from 2016, it also marks the beginning of a new trend which is to organise a province-level international conference to foster the dialogue and stir actions in entrepreneurship ecosystem of all provinces.
"With the country adopting the federal model, we believe the spirit of entrepreneurship should not limit to Kathmandu but the equal share of cake should be tasted by the people across the nation,” informs principal of King’s College Narottam Aryal.
According to him, the major objectives of the conference is to assess, question and to understand the entrepreneurship agenda put forward by the country in the federal states, globally and nationally, look for its sustainability and seek its contribution to economic development.
“As an academic institute, we, therefore, want to provide an informed global platform to debate, build on good practice and seek novel solutions to flourish entrepreneurial ecosystem in the country and thus contribute to economic growth,” he adds.
As Nepal prepares to decentralise country’s policies and programmes from formerly centralised government to the state and local levels, King’s College feels need to host an evidence-based conference in Nepal in order to support all stakeholders involved in the process of current transition, according to the conference coordinator Chittaranjan Pandey.
He further informed that the conference aims at touching upon some of the key issues that are crucial for driving entrepreneurial initiatives under Nepal’s decentralised economy. The sub-themes of the conference includes Federal, Provincial and Local Policies; Social Entrepreneurship; Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship; Private Sector and Entrepreneurship, and Vision 2030, SDGs and Entrepreneurship.
Issuing a press release, the College also informed that the conference will include plenary and parallel sessions, presentations and discussions of academic research, policy driven and reflective practitioner-oriented papers, networking opportunities for the future, showcase of entrepreneurial ventures, social interactions and awards for two best papers, including others.
The College has collaborated with Dhangadhi sub-metropolitan city to host the conference which is being held in support of Sudur Paschim Provincal Government. The three-day long event will also feature five noted international speakers – Prof Satyajit Majumdar and Dr Samapti Guha from TATA Institute of Social Science and Ulla-Maija Seppanen, Janne Karjalainen and Kimmo Paajanen from OAMK Labs Finaland (Oulu University of Applied Sciences)
King’s College had in 2016 hosted its first international conference – entitled, 'International Conference on Social Entrepreneurship', which was followed by the similar conference, '16th International Entrepreneurship Forum' in 2017 – in a bid to encourage dialogue on entrepreneurship and hold government responsible for policy change.