(Photo Handout to DNE)
By Mohamed Alaa El-Din
Innovation in emerging projects is one of the most important characteristics forentrepreneurial projects. Emirati entrepreneur Tarifa Al-Zaabi has made Lego, more commonly associated with childhood, into more than just a game: a tool that gives trainees creative thinking and homogeneity in one team.
Al-Zaabi plans to expand her services to the Egyptian market in the coming period. She also aims to establish a training academy using Lego for kids as well as adults, and to address international donor bodies in the training and education fields to fund her project.
In May, Al-Zaabi won the Entrepreneurial Personality of Mohammed Bin Rashid Award for Young Business Leaders through her GoGlocal project, which was established in 2010 to train 1,200 public employees to use training tools with Lego. The project also trained more than 2,000 kids and adults in different fields related to self-development and life skills.
What is the innovation in using Lego to encourage an employee to be creative in their job?
Innovation comes in linking the brain to the hands. Focusing on the participant’s senses, in thinking and expressing, makes investing in training more efficient. The training mechanism allows the participant to answer all questions through building a figure using Lego bricks and then expressing. Stimulating creativity and innovation depends on how one could transform his intangible thoughts to tangible figures relevant to the designed geometric shape and the colours used. The second training phase depends on the integration of individual figures with the collection. Participants negotiate, talk and evaluate in order to reach solutions and a common expressive idea through one figure which they agree on. The phase supports participants’ creativity where innovation is not an individual’s work, but the work of the team to achieve the goal.
How do you see the situation now in Egypt? Is it suitable for entrepreneurs to start private projects?
Population density in Egypt means youth whose power, ideas, and talents should be invested. As long as there is will, it should be used to start a commercial project. Projects with outstanding costs and recurrent traditional ideas should be prevented. Training and investing in manpower are one of the successful projects which do not need huge capital. One should develop his personal skills and gather much information in the fields that he likes to be creative in. Also using social networks to promote the service and the product has become easy, which enables many aspects of long-term cooperation.
Do you have plans for expanding your services in the Egyptian market?
According to the set plan, we aim to expand in the Egyptian market, especially as it has the largest number of young people in the Middle East. I also plan to open a means of communication with the officials of the Ministry of Education over the upcoming period.
What are the key skills that those who train with Lego acquire?
Training with Lego gives the person many skills, such as creative thinking, imagination, critical thinking, verbalisation, problem solving, team work, and cooperation.
What are the challenges you met at the beginning, and how did you overcome them?
The challenges are many and relative. I got my training certificate from Denmark to train with the Lego Serious Play methodology, which is a methodology that uses Lego in training and developing thinking and innovation. That is because it depends on stimulating the senses by connecting the hand to the mind. The start was difficult, as not many people or enterprises accepted this method of training because it contained toy pieces that known to be effective with children. The challenge was changing this dominant idea by experiment and evaluation. So, the first step was resorting to Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation for supporting youth projects in the UAE. I did so to register in the foundation, and benefit from the counselling services provided by them. I then started giving inductions on training with Lego to employees and decision makers in enterprises to test the methodology and identify the points of strength of the training.
What is your plan for spreading your idea?
I aim to spread the idea of training with Lego widely. My plan has two parts, the first focuses on children through schools and skills’ development centres, and youth clubs. The second part targets employees and leaders, as the training helps stimulate their problem solving skills, includes them in brainstorming and creative analysis. I also plan to establish a Lego academy for youth and children, to develop their skills and open employment doors for youth. We also aim to cooperate with international training specialised entities to help us provide skills’ development opportunities for youth and examine funding opportunities for their training.
What advice would you give to businesswomen aiming to start their own projects?
Many people could be afraid of trying entrepreneurship because traditional thinking about entrepreneurship suggests the importance of a large capital that must be pumped to launch the project. But now, with the change in economic conditions and openness to new thoughts, information exchange, and the technological prosperity, the main element to rely on is a creative idea rather than capital. The sustainability of the project under such strong competition needs a strong creative base. There are many ladies who were able to market their commercial projects through social media networks, and some of them were able to do business from home.
