The Saudi National Creative Initiative (SNCI), which has been in the making for four years now, launched its first Saudi Creative Season on the 2nd of March with a series of workshops. The Social Innovation Week will take place from March 8 till March 13 in three different cities: Jeddah, Riyadh and Khobar. The week will feature five skill-building workshops  facilitated by global practitioners around the topics of leadership, management, creativity and problem-solving, and communication. 

These are the five workshops:

Crowdfunding Immersion Experience by Chris Blauvelt, Graphic Designer at Kaspersky Lab.

A hands-on activity where participants will be split into small groups of three and will create fake crowdfunding campaigns, including shooting pitch videos with their smartphones. The objective of the workshop is to provide the participants with a thorough understanding of crowdfunding, and the knowledge and experience of building and successfully executing a campaign.

Technology thinking applied to social innovation, by Michell Zappa, founder of Envisioning.io

Future Kit is a workshop methodology with creative tools that helps teams address future challenges by leveraging creativity in emerging technology. In the course of an afternoon, teams will develop creative solutions to innovative scenarios in a fast-paced, high-energy setting. They will then build viable sci-fi prototypes and showcase them.

Storytelling for change: what is your why? by Aurelie Salvaire, founder of Shiftbalance.

The objective of this workshop is to simulate the process of a TEDx talk preparation to convey messages by telling powerful stories. At the end of the workshop, the participants will have identified their values and what motivates them in pursuing their studies. They will know how to communicate and deliver effective talks on what they are doing, and why they are doing it. And more importantly, they will get to know each other better and will have had fun!

Shape up your social innovation business with strategy marketing thinking, by Luis A. Garcia Giralt, Associate Professor at EADA Business School Barcelona.

The workshop aims at inspiring creativity in finding feasible business models for social entrepreneurs.

Using Business as a Force For Good​, by Tomas De Lara, a social entrepreneur. 

The content of this workshop will be brought from exposition of concepts and cases, with slides and videos contextualizing new disruptive economic paradigms, such as collaborative and circular economy, social entrepreneurship, business as a positive change tool and cases of B Corps that are changing the definition of success in business. 

Register for the workshops here.