Circular and Lean Startups

Project Title

Circular and Lean Startups

Project Area of Specialization Shared EconomyProject Summary

Circular and Lean Startups is a virtual incubation and accelerator center registered with IPO-Pakistan. The platform provides the services of virtual incubation and startup accelerator. The platform provides the young entrepreneurs and students the facility to pitch their startup or business ideas, which are thoroughly evaluated by the team. The approved startup ideas or businesses are listed on the website from where users (startup founders or business owners) can add details about their business on our platform. The platform offers the students with different courses, training, and online webinar sessions on entrepreneurship, business development, marketing, etc. Circular and Lean Startups also provides the opportunity for creative thinkers to submit their idea, business canvas, and business plan for sale. Also, people can sell their established businesses and do franchising as well. This platform is an all-in-one solution for startups and newly established businesses. The platform will also allow entrepreneurs to promote their businesses and collaborate with other startups or businesses that are also listed on our platform.

The platform also provides a multi-vendor market concept that is more focused on the concept of take-make-use and waste into a reducing, reuse, refurbish and recycle business model. This module has 4 types of transactions involved where one user can resell anything, swap any of the products with another product, rent something, and donate something as a freebie. CLS aims to prolong product lifecycle through reuse, refurbishing, recycling, and reducing wastage of resources during new product development. At Circular and Lean Startups, entrepreneurs are helped to identify innovative business ideas from discarded and waste items that people don’t need anymore. For us trash is valuable and reusable, we only need to cultivate entrepreneurs to discover and explore this hidden untapped economy and come up with more valuable enterprising solutions for it.

Furthermore, to make success affordable and avoid expensive failures, we help startups to take well-calculated risks and adopt a lean-approach. The lean approach reduces the unnecessary use of financial, human, and natural resources in the product creation and development stage. Circular and Lean Startups help entrepreneurs to develop a Minimum viable product (MVP) that consumers desire so that a market already exists as soon as the product is launched.

Project Objectives

Circular and Lean Startups provide a space for people to grow. Incubators center is the institution that assists entrepreneurs in developing their business and solving problems associated with it, especially in the initial stages, by providing an array of business and technical services, initial seed funds, advisory, network, and linkages. CLS’s main objective is to promote the culture of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurial culture can be described as an environment where someone is motivated to innovate, create and take risks. One way to promote the entrepreneurial culture is to generate spaces that highlight the figure of the individuals who have decided to start up a business initiative. CLS provides that space.  It aims to provide all the online courses, training, and online webinar sessions needed for one to know his/her business. 
Circular and Lean startups promise as in their name to provide the concept of lean business. Lean is a way of thinking about creating needed value with fewer resources and less waste. It is a practice consisting of continuous experimentation to achieve perfect value with zero-waste. A lean business is a business that maximizes value while minimizing waste. A Lean business model focuses on improving processes across the value stream to eliminate waste and deliver optimized value to the customer. The seven lean principles are Eliminating waste, building quality, creating knowledge, defer commitment, delivering fast, respecting people, and optimizing the whole. CLS’s main objective is to provide education and knowledge on how one will achieve and implement these goals. The circular and Lean Startups platform aims to furnish the startups whose goal is to make society a cleaner and greener place to live in.  
 

Project Implementation Method

Circular and Lean Startups is a virtual incubation and accelerator center. According to Google virtual means “not physically existing as such but made by software to appear to do so”. This ultimately means that a virtual incubation center will be operated all in the air. Before CLS was implemented, thorough research was conducted in which data was collected from students and incubation centers through questionnaires. That research concluded that a virtual incubation entry was a need in today’s era. In CLS Startups will register online through the official website of Circular and Lean startups, will receive their lectures and training online, and will operate in a virtual environment. 
The website has been deployed using agile methodology and a scrum framework. Agile Methodology is a people-focused, results-focused approach to software development that respects our rapidly changing world. It's centered around adaptive planning, self-organization, and short delivery times. While in the scrum framework we used Jira for project management. It helped in teams' planning, tracking, and releasing software on time and fully functional.  
The requirements for the project were collected through numerous meetings, face to face, and virtually. Every minor detail was noted down and the whole process was voice recorded. After that, the whole requirements were documented and reviewed for further process. 
Other than this, different protentional users, entrepreneurs and clients were met to take their opinion regarding the product and to test it. Their reviews were reviewed by the whole team and essential changes were made to perfect the product.  

Benefits of the Project

Following are the key benefits of the project:

1. Students will enroll their creative and innovative ideas on a platform.
2. People will get a virtual incubation facility where they can not only learn and get trained but also promote their ideas, businesses, and ventures.
3. Young entrepreneurs from around the country and abroad can list their startups, promote them, and ultimately collaborate on similar ventures.
4. Students and aspiring entrepreneurs can learn through different pieces of training, boot camps, and courses.
5. One benefit of the platform is that it promotes environmentally friendly and lean businesses, hence preserving nature.
6. Students can list their ideas for sale, discussion, and franchising on our platform.
7. The multivendor marketplace of the site allows making use of their used materials by either reselling them for fewer prices or swapping them with other products.
8. People can donate unnecessary material from their houses to our platform, which our platform will deliver to our partner organizations for possible reuse or recycling.
9. People can read about the latest technologies and news regarding entrepreneurship.
10. People can rent a virtual shop on the loop market to sell any products that they wish to sell on the platforms.

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

The final software product has been made using the following technologies:

1. Our team used Jira, Asana, and Slack during the development of the project for communication, progress tracking, and teamwork.
2. We used creative cloud and Adobe Xd for the designing and wire-framing.
3. The graphics that can be seen on the website have been made in Illustrator and Figma.
4. VueJs, HTML5, and CSS were used for the frontend development of the project.
5. MySQL database is used.
6. For the development of the backend, we have used Laravel.
7. We did black box and white box testing for the whole website throughout the year.
8. We used an X-ray in Jira for testing.
9. The website is deployed on a share-server.

Final Deliverable of the Project Software SystemCore Industry ITOther Industries Education , Food , Telecommunication Core Technology Shared EconomyOther Technologies OthersSustainable Development Goals Quality Education, Affordable and Clean Energy, Decent Work and Economic Growth, Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure, Sustainable Cities and Communities, Responsible Consumption and Production, Climate ActionRequired Resources

Item Name	Type	No. of Units	Per Unit Cost (in Rs)	Total (in Rs)
			Total in (Rs)	74692
Jira Subscription for 4 months	Equipment	4	1408	5632
Adobe Xd Subscription for 5 months	Equipment	5	1820	9100
Xray Jira 2 months Bills	Equipment	2	1880	3760
Domain Name	Equipment	1	1400	1400
User Authentication Module Developed By a Laravel Developer	Equipment	1	45000	45000
Miscellaneous Costs	Miscellaneous	1	9800	9800