Co-design with Paracelis. Build with Baguio and Ateneo. Scale across the Philippines.

The Baguio–Paracelis–Ateneo Startup & Innovation Fellowship brings together local innovators, startups, universities, researchers, creatives, and entrepreneurs to solve real-world challenges and build solutions with the potential to scale nationwide.

At the center of the Fellowship are Cordillera-based Innovators. 

Farmers, entrepreneurs, young people, professionals, community leaders, government personnel, makers, researchers, and other local problem-solvers work alongside innovators from Baguio, Ateneo, Mountain Province State University, and the TARAKI Innovation Network.

The goal is not to bring ready-made solutions into Paracelis.

The goal is to co-design solutions with the people who understand the challenges best.

One Innovation Ecosystem

Paracelis

Paracelis is the co-design and field innovation ground.

Local innovators help identify problems, develop ideas, test prototypes, and refine solutions.

Paracelis provides a real-world setting for innovation in agriculture, energy, climate resilience, food systems, local enterprise, governance, finance, infrastructure, and community development.

Baguio

Baguio brings entrepreneurial, creative, and technical talent.

Startups, designers, engineers, technologists, researchers, university teams, and entrepreneurs can form joint innovation teams with Paracelis partners.

Rather than arriving with predetermined solutions, Baguio innovators work with local partners to understand problems and build solutions together.

Ateneo

Ateneo expands the innovation network.

Through collaboration with the Ateneo Innovation Program, Fellows may connect with students, faculty, researchers, mentors, entrepreneurs, and multidisciplinary innovation teams.

Possible collaborations include:

• Product and service development

• Technology and AI

• Design and prototyping

• User and market research

• Business model development

• Entrepreneurship mentoring

• Research collaboration

• Commercialization

• Intellectual property

• Venture development

Mountain Province State University

Mountain Province State University serves as a local academic and innovation anchor.

MPSU can connect Fellows with local research, faculty expertise, student innovators, communities, entrepreneurship programs, and government partners.

Its participation helps ensure that innovation capability remains rooted within Mountain Province.

TARAKI Innovation Network

TARAKI connects the Fellowship to a wider regional innovation ecosystem.

Through TARAKI, promising ideas and ventures can connect with universities, innovators, mentors, researchers, government partners, and additional testing sites across the Cordilleras and Northern Luzon.

This creates pathways for successful innovations to move from one community to many.

How the Fellowship Works

The Fellowship follows a practical pathway:

Discover → Co-design → Prototype → Test → Validate → Replicate → Scale

Discover

Start with a real problem.

Local innovators, communities, government, businesses, researchers, and startup teams work together to understand the challenge and why it persists.

Co-design

Paracelis innovators work with Baguio, Ateneo, MPSU, and TARAKI collaborators to develop possible solutions.

Local knowledge and lived experience are combined with science, technology, design, research, and entrepreneurship.

Prototype

Teams build early versions of products, services, technologies, digital tools, business models, community enterprises, or public-sector innovations.

Test

Promising solutions are tested in real-world settings in Paracelis.

Validate

Teams gather evidence about whether the solution works, whether people will use it, whether institutions can adopt it, and whether it can be financially and operationally sustained.

Replicate

Successful innovations can be adapted and tested in other communities through university, LGU, startup, and TARAKI partners.

Scale

Validated solutions can pursue wider adoption across the Philippines through government, business, university, investor, and development-sector partnerships.

Who Can Join?

The Fellowship welcomes:

• Paracelis innovators and entrepreneurs

• Baguio-based startups

• Social entrepreneurs

• Farmers and farmer entrepreneurs

• Students and young innovators

• AI and technology teams

• Designers and creatives

• Engineers, architects, and makers

• Researchers

• University innovation teams

• Cooperatives and community enterprises

• Climate and energy innovators

• Independent problem-solvers

You do not need to arrive with a finished startup.

You may join with an existing venture, prototype, technology, research idea, or simply an important problem you want to solve.

Innovation Challenge Areas

Fellows may work on challenges related to:

Smart Agriculture

Farm productivity, irrigation, post-harvest systems, food processing, logistics, farmer enterprises, and agricultural technologies.

Sustainable Energy

Solar irrigation, microgrids, productive-use energy, renewable energy enterprises, and energy efficiency.

AI for Governance

Digital public services, municipal AI tools, workflow automation, analytics, decision-support systems, and responsible AI.

Climate Action

Water security, climate adaptation, disaster resilience, environmental monitoring, ecosystem protection, and resilient livelihoods.

Social Enterprise

Community businesses, cooperatives, livelihood platforms, inclusive enterprises, and local value chains.

Zero Hunger and Nutrition

Food production, nutrition, local food systems, food logistics, and innovative service delivery.

Financial Inclusion and Social Finance

Agricultural finance, insurance, digital finance, savings, community investment, and blended finance.

Bamboo and Forest-Based Enterprise

Bamboo products, sustainable materials, forest enterprises, circular production, and nature-based businesses.

Public-Private Partnerships

Energy, water, infrastructure, markets, logistics, digital services, and other innovations requiring collaboration among government, communities, and businesses.

What Fellows Gain

Fellows gain opportunities to:

• Work on real problems

• Join multidisciplinary co-design teams

• Build and test prototypes

• Engage real users and institutional partners

• Collaborate with the Ateneo Innovation Program

• Work with Mountain Province State University

• Connect with the TARAKI Innovation Network

• Access mentors and technical expertise

• Develop startups and social enterprises

• Explore commercialization and financing pathways

• Test solutions in new communities

• Build toward regional and national scale

Locally Rooted Innovation

The Fellowship recognizes that innovation does not begin only in laboratories, universities, or startup hubs.

It also begins with farmers, communities, frontline workers, entrepreneurs, Indigenous knowledge holders, and local problem-solvers.

Paracelis innovators are not simply beneficiaries or research participants.

They are co-designers, co-builders, and potential venture creators.

The Fellowship encourages meaningful participation in problem definition, design, testing, implementation, enterprise development, commercialization, and scaling.

Local knowledge meets technology.

Community experience meets entrepreneurship.

Research meets real-world implementation.

From the Cordilleras to the Philippines

Many challenges found in Paracelis are shared by communities across the country.

Agriculture, water security, climate resilience, renewable energy, food systems, digital government, finance, infrastructure, and livelihoods affect thousands of Philippine communities.

A solution can begin with one farmer.

It can be tested in one barangay.

It can work across one municipality.

It can then be adapted in another province.

And eventually, it can become a solution for communities across the Philippines.

The Fellowship creates a pathway:

Paracelis Innovator
↓
Baguio + MPSU + Ateneo Co-design Team
↓
Prototype
↓
Paracelis Field Validation
↓
TARAKI Network Replication
↓
Multi-LGU Adoption
↓
National Scale

Start local. Build together. Scale nationally.

The question at the heart of the Fellowship is simple:

What can Paracelis innovators co-design with partners today that could eventually help communities across the Philippines?

Program Objectives

1. Co-create innovative solutions to local development challenges through Creative Inquiry.
   Enable faculty, students, local governments, Indigenous communities, civil society, and other stakeholders to collaboratively address complex public challenges using Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA), interdisciplinary research, and participatory innovation.

2. Transform teaching, research, and student learning through real-world engagement.
   Integrate undergraduate and graduate students into multidisciplinary, community-based projects that generate practical solutions, applied research, policy recommendations, and innovations that strengthen sustainable and inclusive local development.

3. Build transnational partnerships to accelerate progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
   Connect Fellows with universities, researchers, practitioners, and communities across the Philippines and around the world to exchange knowledge, share innovations, and collaborate on SDG-related challenges through an international Community of Practice, enabling locally developed solutions to inform global learning while adapting global insights to local contexts.

Paracelis Municipality: An Innovation Gateway to the Cordilleras

Paracelis is envisioned not only as a site for university–community engagement, but as an innovation gateway to the Cordilleras—a culturally diverse and ecologically significant region with a population of approximately 1.8 million people.

With a land area of approximately 270 square kilometers, Paracelis offers a substantial and diverse environment for developing, testing, and refining practical solutions. Its geographic scale, communities, ecosystems, livelihoods, and development conditions provide high potential for piloting viable innovations before adapting and scaling them to other municipalities in Mountain Province and across the wider Cordillera Administrative Region.

Through the partnership, Paracelis becomes a living laboratory for systems innovation, where faculty, students, municipal leaders, Indigenous communities, civil society organizations, and development partners co-create solutions that respond to local priorities while generating knowledge that can inform policy and practice across the region.

The Ateneo-Paracelis Co-creation Labs

Adapting from MIT's social lab ecosystem, a network of social labs serve as multi-year innovation platforms connecting Ateneo faculty, students, municipal leaders, communities, Indigenous knowledge holders, partner universities, and development organizations around shared development priorities.

Unlike traditional academic projects that often conclude at the end of a semester, the Co-creation Labs provide continuity by advancing innovation initiatives from one semester to the next. They enable successive cohorts of faculty and students to build upon previous work, allowing ideas to mature from early exploration to validated solutions with measurable community impact. The Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) methodology helps build-up traction and capacity among partners in projects.  

The Social Labs help overcome the limitations of semestral academic cycles by creating an institutional memory of research findings, community relationships, datasets, prototypes, policy recommendations, and implementation experiences. Rather than beginning from scratch each semester, new faculty and student teams contribute to an expanding body of knowledge and innovation.

The initial portfolio of Paracelis-Ateneo Co-creation Labs includes:

• Governance Innovation Lab

• AI4Gov Lab

• Climate Action Labs

• Smart Agri Lab

• Sustainable Energy Lab

• Bamboo Impact Lab

• Zero Hunger Lab

• Social Finance Lab

• Social Enterprise Lab

• Public-Private Partnership (PPP) Lab

• Financial Inclusion Lab

• Innovation Ecosystem Strengthening Lab  and more

Together, these interconnected Social Labs create a long-term innovation ecosystem where teaching, research, extension, and community partnership reinforce one another. Over time, we envision co-listed innovation projects with the Mt.Province State University and other Cordillera-based universities, cultivating depth of knowledge, evidence, trusted relationships, and practical innovations needed to strengthen Paracelis while contributing solutions that can be adapted across the Cordilleras. 

From Prototypes to Startups thru the Ateneo AIPO

We aim to take viable prototypes to scale through startups or technology licensing. Beyond research publications, promising solution prototypes can be incubated into startups or licensable technologies through the Ateneo Intellectual Property Office (AIPO). Solutions to problems in Paracelis are likely partially relevant to the rest of the Cordilleras, or parts of the Philippines, or Southeast Asia. The AIPO provides the lab-to-market bridge towards scalable impact. 

The TARAKI Cordillera Innovation Ecosystem with Partner Universities

The TARAKI-CAR (Technological Consortium for Awareness, Readiness, and Advancement of Knowledge in Innovation) Cordillera university consortium. The Ateneo–Paracelis Faculty Impact Fellowship is designed to generate impact far beyond a single course, project, or academic year and will cultivate regional co-creating initiatives with TARAKI-CAR partner faculty.

By working with Paracelis as an innovation gateway to the Cordilleras, the Ateneo-Paracelis Faculty Impact Fellowship creates opportunities for faculty and students to contribute to solutions that can benefit a region of approximately 1.8 million people.

At the center of this effort are the Ateneo-Paracelis Social Labs, which provide the long-term continuity necessary for transformative innovation. While individual courses may last only one semester, the Social Labs sustain multi-year research agendas, community partnerships, policy experiments, and innovation initiatives that continue to evolve over time.

This continuity enables deeper scholarship, stronger community relationships, richer longitudinal evidence, and more robust innovation than would be possible through isolated academic projects alone.

With an area of approximately 270 square kilometers, Paracelis provides an ideal municipal-scale environment for testing integrated solutions before adapting successful approaches throughout Mountain Province, the wider Cordillera region, and other mountain and Indigenous communities across the Philippines.

The Fellowship seeks to demonstrate how a university–local government partnership can transform teaching, research, and public service into a sustained platform for regional innovation and community impact.

Academe-Government-Community-Industry Co-creation

Paracelis Research Opportunities/ Problem Sets

Faculty Impact Fellows will have a direct line to social lab managers in Paracelis, facilitating inclusive desing, data-gathering and joint interpretation. An emerging partnership with the Mt.Province State University and the TARAKI Innovation Consortium of the Cordillera-based universities can help accelerate and amplify impact.