Microskills is an education start-up aimed at leveraging technology and human-centered design to empower unskilled entrepreneurs in low-income communities to develop their business. Our mission is to grow their human capital and resources for access to markets in order to increase their income, our solutions are adapted to their literacy level, mother tongue and cultural context. We believe our company brings value to the microenterprise training market because of its innovative design of a smartphone education application, which makes possible an ever evolving and contextually relevant learning experience for the user. By leveraging new research on human-computer interaction in emerging markets and our own user-testing, we were able to design a maximally engaging learning experience fo...[ Read more ]

Microskills is an education start-up aimed at leveraging technology and human-centered design to empower unskilled entrepreneurs in low-income communities to develop their business. Our mission is to grow their human capital and resources for access to markets in order to increase their income, our solutions are adapted to their literacy level, mother tongue and cultural context. We believe our company brings value to the microenterprise training market because of its innovative design of a smartphone education application, which makes possible an ever evolving and contextually relevant learning experience for the user. By leveraging new research on human-computer interaction in emerging markets and our own user-testing, we were able to design a maximally engaging learning experience for microentrepreneurs. This takes the form of an accessible robot mentor - eventually an AI-mentor - that learns from the user’s business decisions and preferences to assist in developing their existing business. Microskills is a Hong Kong based start-up that is aimed at emerging markets in South and South-East Asia, starting with India.

This thesis will start by introducing the project with background on how it began, and then describe Microskills, discuss the research on upskilling microentrepreneurs and on the associated education technology market. Then, the two technical chapters about microenterprise training and human-computer interaction in emerging markets will respectively detail the contents of our start-up project and explain how our product uses technology to add value to an educational experience. Finally, the business plan for the project will be explained, from an analysis of the education technology market and of how our product fits within it, to the scenario’s sales strategy and business model.