Encouraging Innovation in DEWA

Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) adopts a clear strategy that is carefully studied to empower People of Determination, as a socially-responsible organisation that includes People of Determination. This supports the National Policy for Empowering POD. DEWA always launches initiatives and programmes to encourage innovation of DEWA’s POD employees and customers. This is part of its efforts to make Dubai the happiest city in the world. DEWA Employed 27 People of Determination in seven divisions. Their happiness score was 99% in 2019, while Social Happiness about DEWA’s supporting POD reached 94% in 2019. DEWA continues its intensive efforts to increase their happiness and satisfaction and encourage their innovations.

Sponsoring the innovations of employees of determination

Information about the creative employee		Creativity details
Name	Ahmed Mohammed Noor Al Hashemi	Ahmed is talented in Origami, the Japanese art of folding paper to design unique pieces of art in a beautiful and exquisite manner. Ahmed has always loved arts and used it to kill his spare time. His talent soon developed to an advanced level with his hard work and practice. He now creates outstanding pieces that impress everybody.
Job title	Senior Officer - Admin
Name	Haifa Ahmed Nasser Al Haddad	Haifa’s journey with writing started as an idea during her study. She used to visualise the end of short stories she read at school. She had the opportunity to join the Omniyati initiative by DEWA to make the wishes of POD true. Haifa informed Omniyati team about her wish to publish a story. DEWA’s team welcomed the idea and agreed to publish it on its expenses. Haifa was overwhelmed with happiness when she saw the first copy of her story. She was grateful to DEWA for making her wish come true, and making her feel capable of learning a lot about writing. Haifa read her story to children at the nursery, who liked it and interacted with it.
Job title	Executive - Admin
Name	Fatima Al Suwaidi	Fatima Al Suwaidi was distinguished from an early age by her unique talent, skills, and imagination that contributed to her success in creating stories for children. Al Suwaidi joined DEWA, which contributed to enriching her talents in recitation and writing. Al Suwaidi also showed passion for volunteer work that stems mainly from her humanitarian spirit to provide a helping hand to others in need. Her writing talent was discovered at one of DEWA’s internal activities. Thanks to praise and encouragement she received, Al Suwaidi decided to publish her first story entitled "Union Day". She looks forward to nurturing her talents in the future in writing and literature.
Job title	Senior Executive – Connecting distribution networks

DEWA’s Employees of Determination participation in DEWA’s innovation activities

DEWA’s Employees of Determination participation in its innovation activities, such as Innovation Week, DEWA Store, the Water, Energy, Technology, and Environment Exhibition (WETEX), POD Talents activity.

Sponsoring the innovations of DEWA’s Academy Students of Determination

SMART Wheel Chair
Technology offers solutions to the pressing challenges of our society. Using technical skills, which they developed during their study at DEWA Academy, they thought of helping POD, by designing a SMART WHEEL CHAIR to assist people using wheel chair that can be controlled either by Joystick or by the movement of head.
The goal of this SMART WHEEL CHAIR project is to enhance an ordinary wheel chair using Arduino, transceiver module and accelerometer to move POD from one place to another place. This wheel chair is appropriate for people who have lost mobility but retain the movement of hand or head. If anyone lost the movement of leg only, they can use this wheel chair and control the movement by both a Joystick and Head mode.

Students who participated in this project:

1- Ahmed Mohammed Awadh Ali Al Mehairi

2- Hamad Ibrahim bin Hindi

3- Saeed Fahd AbdulQader Ahmed Al Hajeri

4- Khalid Sheikh Mubarak Khamis Al Falasi

5- Khalifa Badr Salem Saeed Al Alawi

6- Mayed Waleed Mohammed Abdullah Al Ali

Sponsoring innovation in rehabilitation centers for people of determination

DEWA launched DEWA’s Innovation Centre at the Dubai Rehabilitation Centre for People of Determination in Al Qusais. The centre provides over 150 POD students with training on modern technologies. It ensures a positive innovative educational environment, increasing their knowledge, empowering them to engage in all kinds of social activities to become creative and innovative individuals.

DEWA’s Innovation Centre’s Services at Dubai Rehabilitation Centre for POD

- Imagination corner: it supports learning through widening imagination and enhancing innovation of students through a touch screen and small interactive tablets.

- The small innovator corner: it includes tools and devices that makes free learning easier to develop the students’ motor skills through making simplified robot modules, geometric shapes and architectural models.

- Solar energy corner: it connects the environmental concepts with the students’ life through a group of environmental tools to generate electricity such as (electric house, electric fan, electric vehicle).

- Robot corner: it includes various mobile robots that can be assembled such as (crane, truck, automatic car). The students assemble the plastic pieces to make the robot based on booklets or using computers.

- New Robot corner: it is a half meter progammable robot that uses simple language, it can walk, move, and speak according to its programme.

- Three-dimension printing corner: this is the heart of the lab. It has two 3D printers that can print anything in the mind of POD students by scanning models like cups, toys, fruit etc..

The impact of the support provided to the Centre

- Economic impact: sustainability of education innovative sources in the centre.

- Social impact: improving education quality in POD centres through providing innovative learning tools that meet the education needs of students.

- Strategic impact: to support the Dubai Strategy for the People of Determination 2020.

DEWA’s Innovation Centre at the Dubai Rehabilitation Centre for People of Determination received the UAE Ideas Award for promoting voluntary and humanitarian work at the 6th UAE Ideas Conference & Award.

Sponsoring innovation through DEWA’s main events

A) DEWA organised its “Forum for Happiness and Integration of People of Determination” on the Arab Day for People with Disability with participation of 16 government organisations to show their products, talents and ideas at DEWA’s tent.

B) DEWA encourages POD to launch their innovative ideas, it also supports them to implement their practical ideas. DEWA organised a youth circle for POD. POD from other government organisations and senior managers participated to commemorate the role of the late Founding Father Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, in supporting POD and to create ideas to continue the late Sheikh Zayed’s giving journey. DEWA honoured the participants. Some 46 DEWA employees also attended.

Enhance the experience of POD customers and involving them to innovate and develop smart services

DEWA is organising ongoing focus groups of POD customers and employees to develop DEWA’s services for POD, including:

1) Innovating an including customer experience according to the type of disability and different needs of POD, and providing needed mechanisms for each disability to make providing services easier in 2018.

2) Adding the interactive audio conversation in Arabic and English through Rammas, and improving the service and adding more privileges like text reader, happiness index, and customer experience survey. Providing a visual communication channels using sign language.

3) Enrolling POD customers in the list of people to ensure providing them with ongoing regular services.

4) Updating DEWA’s Customer Guide to include POD (the guide includes facilities, services, channels …) and copies of Braille language.

5) Dedicated comprehensive service desks.

6) A video about DEWA’s key services in sign language is also played on screens at the Customer Happiness Centres.

7) Wheelchair service.

8) Paying bills through Beam Robot, and valet parking.

9) Directional tactile paving for the visually-impaired.

10) POD system to organise the queue.