Business leaders present ‘Reverse Innovation’ challenges – Khmer Times

The Techo Startup Center’s virtual Reverse Innovation programme kicked off yesterday with business leaders and sector experts presenting a range of challenges from which budding innovators will craft custom solutions. The programme is designed to turn the pitching process on its head, with companies sharing their challenges rather than innovators pitching new ideas. Jasreen Kaur, head of customer experience and digital touchpoints at Smart Axiata, presented the first challenge by inviting innovation on the company’s Know Your Customer (KYC) process. “Mobile operators maintain complete and genuine profiles of all customers as part of the KYC process. This allows us to personalise offerings for our subscribers and optimise our services,” she said. “However, there are gaps whereby some legacy numbers are not registered with profiles and some numbers are registered with inaccurate/not genuine profiles,” she added.

Kaur said that sometimes SIM cards registered through the Smart DealerApp, or bought and sold on to other users can leave the company unable to verify whether a registered profile is genuine, which leaves gaps in the KYC.

“[When these profile holders] update their documents with us, we are unable to verify [whether] they are genuine to the owner,” she added. “Therefore, our challenge is for someone to create a digital KYC process that will solve the profile registration gap by making sure profiles are genuine at the point of dealer sales or when customers update and verify their profiles,” she finished.

This challenge was one of a range of  KYC challenges from participants attending the event.  Among the organisations and companies presenting were AMK MFI, CAFT, CBC, Agribuddy, Wing and PPCBank.

Now that the challenges have been set, entrepreneurs, innovators and start-up groups will have until Jan 15 to apply with their proposed solutions, with 10 to 15 of the best solutions being selected to participate in the next round.

Those groups will then undergo expert tutorage and mentoring sessions, that will include in-depth guidance on the challenges and the needs of clients and workshops on “enhancing and leveraging the entrepreneurial mindset” and “identifying problem-solution fits”.

Five groups will then be chosen to enter the final Reverse Innovation phase, which will incorporate 12 weeks of business development sessions, including industry specific workshops as well as activities based on digital marketing, financial projection and business modelling, raising capital, setting goals and more.

Finally, on May 12, the five finalists will get to pitch their fully formulated ideas back to the sector experts. The top three groups will receive cash prizes, with first place honours netting $10,000, second place $7,500 and third place $5,000.

The Techo Startup Center is a publicly administered institution under the Ministry of Economy and Finance.