Innovation, Collaboration, and Entrepreneurship in Cairo

I met today with Adam Molyneux-Berry: Co- founder of IceCairo, an amazing company, creative space, and community where you can learn and share your knowledge and skills to help yourself and help others. The IceCairo team encourages innovation, collaboration, and entrepreneurship.

My meeting with Adam and his coworkers at the IceCairo hub is a part of another documentary project I'm working on about startups and the sharing culture in businesses around the world in today's chaotic economy.  

Adam is interested not only in new innovative ideas and products, but also in creating exciting products at very low cost, to help people in Egypt. For example they have worked on sponsoring a hackathon to create a solar-powered water heater for people who don’t have access to power or gas. Adam thinks in the long run people will be able to get off the grid using this type of water heater, like they do in Gaza, Egypt's next door neighbor.

One of Adam's coworkers, Muhammad Radwan, is a political activist who participated in the Egyptian revolution from the beginning. He is part of team, and he told me that he thinks it is valuable to keep a positive outlook in the traditionally negative political environment in Egypt.

Jay Cousin also works with IceCairo as their Community Catalyst. He believes that we don’t have to wait for the government to solve all our problems. We can share our knowledge and skills to build small businesses now, and grow our own resources in the new world economy.

Jay also pointed out that mere ideas are not as precious as most people think. He believes in the implementation. Many people can come up with similar ideas around the world at the same time, but how many of them can actually create something out of their ideas.

Providing the creative environment in which an idea can turn into a reality is very important, and IceCairo is trying to encourage the kind of collaboration that can help bring an idea into the world, where many people can benefit from it.

I left the IceCairo offices very enthusiastic; I feel like I got a dose of optimism.