TEF Fostering Innovation Through Lean Canvas Workshop

The Tourism Enhancement Fund (TEF) staged a Lean Canvas Workshop aimed is fostering entrepreneurship and innovation in the sector.

Director of Research and Risk Management at TEF, Gis’elle Jones, told JIS News that the session, held on January 29, was conceived to fill a knowledge gap identified by the TEF within the sector.

“Our strategic objective is really to increase the rate of innovation in tourism in Jamaica. We run a tourism innovation challenge where we aim to select 25 new innovative business ideas, and that is how we usually go about achieving our strategic objectives. However, what we do end up getting is a lot of people calling us and asking us how they can go about refining their ideas,” she noted.

As such, she said, the Lean Canvas Workshop aimed to address this gap by helping participants at various stages refine and validate their business ideas.

“We have persons at ideation stage, we have people who have already prototyped and what is interesting is that a lot of them are not looking for funding; they are just looking for technical expertise. So, what we’ve decided to do is to provide workshops for those who are not in our programme so that we can still reach other Jamaicans as well,” she told JIS News.

The workshop was centred around an ideation tool, aimed at helping persons understand the problems they are solving, identify their target customers, and develop a unique value proposition.

“What am I offering that’s different? What are the inputs that I’m going to need and how much will that cost me, and how am I going to then generate revenue? Those are the things that they can validate, and we help them through that process in the Lean Canvas workshop,” Ms. Jones pointed out.

An additional Pitch Deck Workshop will be held on February 12 for participants who have already developed a prototype or a full-fledged product and are looking to scale their businesses.