Call of the direction of the Blue Ocean Awards, the General Delegation to Rapid Entrepreneurship of Women and Youth of Senegal, the Embassy of France in Senegal, HEC Paris and the Association of Grandes Ecoles and Institutes of Senegal for the launch of the first ever Blue Ocean Awards Senegal. The winners will be unveiled in early December 2022 during a prestigious event organized at the General Directorate for Rapid Entrepreneurship of Women and Youth, attached to the General Secretariat of the Presidency of the Republic of Senegal.
Following the first edition in South Africa in 2021, the Blue Ocean Awards announce their very first Senegalese edition for December 2022 and invite Senegalese companies creating new markets to apply now. The competition is open to any company based in Senegal, regardless of its maturity, its business or its sector. The only criterion to be a candidate is to have an already commercialized offer.
> The closing date for applications is November 30, 2022
> Being a candidate takes only 10 seconds as you only need to share your website on this form: https: //www.blue-ocean-awards.com/candidater
Who will succeed Sun Mobility, Tarmac Technologies, Unseenlabs, Gifts for change, R-PUR, Yescapa, Yupwego, Shopit, Protifly, Transeco2, Biomede, Tilkee, Genae, Jamble and Metsi a Teng awarded in 2021 in Pretoria, South Africa, HEC Paris, Lyon and Bordeaux?
The winning companies will participate in the HEC incubator program, where they will receive business development support, technical support, connections and networking opportunities. HEC Paris joined the Blue Ocean Awards to help transition the economy through African entrepreneurship. The rich HEC Paris ecosystem of expert alumni, mentors, professors, students and staff is available to help companies accelerate their projects.
Created in 2014 by Alban Eral with the support of the French Ministry of Economy and HEC Paris, the Blue Ocean Awards are directly inspired by the concept of Blue Ocean Strategy, which stems from the research work of W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne on value-based innovation. In their worldwide bestsellers Blue Ocean Strategy and Blue Ocean SHIFT, the two INSEAD professors deciphered how to free oneself from competition (the Red Ocean) and create a new market (the Blue Ocean) through a new value proposition based on an understanding of the "non-clients" of one's industry.
In eight years, the Blue Ocean Awards have become much more than a prestigious prize, allowing more than 400 innovative companies to present their projects to an international jury of investors and major groups open to partnerships, and more than 200 of them to be recognized as "blue ocean" companies.
The Blue Ocean Awards have enabled these companies to accelerate their financing [9 out of 10 winners financed within 6 months] and their international visibility via its network of interconnected local ecosystems made up of key players from the public sector (embassies, government agencies, ministries), local authorities (major cities and regions), schools and universities, incubators and gas pedals, major international groups and professional investors (VCs, business angels, family offices, institutional investors). The members of the Blue Ocean Awards ecosystem all share the same vision: only "value-driven" innovation can transform our human societies towards a more responsible, sustainable and inclusive world.
From the application deadline of November 30, 2022, the finalist companies will be invited to online workshops offered by the French Embassy in Senegal. These workshops, designed to prepare them for the Blue Ocean Awards jury, will be led by the Blue Ocean Strategy senior trainers of the Blue Ocean Awards team, via our collaborative platform dedicated to Blue Ocean project management.
In December 2022, will be held live on the YouTube channel of the Blue Ocean Awards, the investor juries made up of VCs, Business Angels, family offices, institutional and private individuals from the international ecosystem of the Blue Ocean Awards, chosen for their willingness to invest specifically in Senegal and Africa.
Finally, the announcement of the winning companies will be made during the award ceremony in December 2022, on the occasion of an exceptional day at the General Directorate for Rapid Entrepreneurship of Women and Youth of Senegal, broadcast live on YouTube
Dr. Mame Aby Seye
Minister Delegate General Delegation for Rapid Entrepreneurship of Women and Youth
Operational since 2018, the General Delegation for Rapid Entrepreneurship of Women and Youth has made the support of Senegalese nuggets, its raison d'être in particular through the Innovation Support Fund (ISF) which has funded 230 startups and trained 415 entrepreneurs via various tailored support programs. In the continuity of this dynamic, the DER/FJ is pleased to collaborate with the initiators of the Blue Ocean Awards and thus offer new opportunities to the pool of innovative startups in Senegal.
Philippe Lalliot
Ambassador of France to Senegal and The Gambia
The French Embassy in Senegal is pleased to support the first international edition of the Blue Ocean Awards, a prestigious innovation competition initiated by INSEAD and HEC Paris. This edition is fully in line with our wish to support the development of the particularly dynamic innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystem in Senegal. It is also a great opportunity to bring together our respective ecosystems
Philippe Oster
Director of International Affairs at HEC Paris
HEC Paris has supported the Blue Ocean Awards since their inception in 2014. Every year, we are happy to see our entrepreneurs highlighted for their ability to think outside the box and create new markets. I am thinking in particular of Agorize, Yogist, Advitam, Tarmac Technologies, Bird Office, Sillages Paris. We continue to develop our HEC Innovation & Entrepreneurship Center to support them. In addition, we are delighted that the Blue Ocean Awards are taking on a strong international dimension this year, with the launch of the first edition dedicated to Senegal, which is a logical step in the school's development on the African continent.
Alban Eral
Founder of the Blue Ocean Awards & BlueCity
It is a great honor for the Blue Ocean Awards to connect the innovation ecosystem of Senegal to our ecosystems developed in Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon since 2014 and in South Africa in 2021, before adding India in 2023. Indeed, Senegal, like South Africa, is a land of innovation with a strong societal impact that values responsible and inclusive innovation, relying on a highly educated and entrepreneurial youth. The Blue Ocean Awards in Senegal were born from the unfailing support of the French Embassy in Senegal and the meeting between the DER and HEC Paris. Just as in South Africa in 2021, the Senegalese innovation fabric seems ready to support an ambitious program like BlueCity to build the inclusive City of Tomorrow
Press contact: Bertrand Espitalier, Director of Communications
- Mobile +336 63 12 77 44
- E-mail communication@blue-awards.com
About the Blue Ocean Awards
The Blue Ocean Awards were created in 2014 by Alban Eral, with HEC Paris and the Ministry of Economy, Finance and Recovery. The Blue Ocean Awards are the only event in the world that rewards companies that have followed a strategy known as the Blue Ocean Strategy , which aims to create a new market away from the competition.
About HEC Paris
HEC Paris is a leading French business school in Europe whose ambition is to have a positive impact on business and society. Its Center of Expertise, the Innovation & Entrepreneurship Center, contributes to making HEC Paris a benchmark institution in innovation and entrepreneurship. It supports the vocation of the innovators it trains and accompanies them in the development of their project. Its mission is to support and promote innovation - to produce and mobilize knowledge and methods for action - to enable potential - both individual and economic - to be revealed, expressed and realized. To develop with ambition, efficiency and impact!
About the Association of Grandes Ecoles and Institutes of Senegal (AGEIS)
The Association of Grandes Ecoles and Institutes of Senegal (AGEIS), which brings together students from the following institutions: IST, ENSAE, ENSA, ESEA, IPSL, ISFAR, EPT, IUT and ESP born on Sunday, February 14, 2021 in the premises of the École Nationale Supérieure d'Agriculture (ENSA), is a framework of exchange which will allow to remedy the problems encountered by the Grandes Ecoles and Institutes of Senegal.
Its objectives are to make students of member institutions aware of the opportunities of entrepreneurship, to promote interdisciplinarity by recommending that project leaders form teams with diverse profiles, to support students in the formalization and incubation of their projects, and to promote the Senegalese elite that these schools and institutes contain.
