On November 3, open lecture on Bootstrap Finance was held by Thomas Arctaedius and Andreas Nilsson (Sweden) for students of Electronics and Computer Science Department within the course on Entrepreneurship and Innovation, organized by assoc.prof. Ihor Katernyak:
The next day, on November 4, 2016, the BEDI project work
group had a workshop where we discussed a new concept - "The Room" – as
a physical place where young potential entrepreneurs can get help
working on early stage ideas before they start a new company.
The main goal of the workshop was to find solutions for local challenges with invited key stakeholders from industry, policy and academia. The workshops focused on how create The Room with a content that can: increase the innovation capacity through collaboration; identify drivers and barriers, exchange of good examples and lessons learned.
- Meeting place to get inspired;
- Leverage legal department, Finance department students who will provide legal and financial guidance and answer potential entrepreneurs’ questions;
- There should be an admin person, running the Room, collecting participants’ needs and arranging meetings to address topics of interest;
- Invite successful people to share their “success stories” and serve as an inspiration for the entrepreneurs-to-be and actually encourage them “to want to be entrepreneurs”;
- Might be a good idea to think of incentives for experienced and successful entrepreneurs to encourage them to participate in the Room activities;
- Have a Champion/Ambassador of the Room;
- Invite people who were born in the country, then left to work abroad and came back and can share their international experience, ideas (that can be benefited from or implemented by Room members);
- The Room can serve university and school-leavers;
- When Room is successful ,membership can be introduced (e.g. “basic package «for free and extended package will require some fees);
- Local authorities might help with financing , media support, etc. as such projects as promote the city;
- Have a number of Rooms which will eventually become a part of “group club”
- Staff to run the Room – we can hire someone or we can have students run it;
- Participate in well-known IT events as a way to promote the Room;
- Entrepreneurs-to-be can use the address of the room as legal address.
We aim to have one The Room in Lviv and one in Tbilisi open for business by the summer 2017.