One of the most important events within iDEAlab project was organized from 24th to 30th of October, 2016, in Novi Sad, Serbia. University of Novi Sad as the project coordinator organized this start-up competition for entrepreneurial students from the region.

This competition gathered more than 80 students’ coming from Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Montenegro, which developed more than 20 innovative ideas. Students were supported by experienced mentors coming from regional iDEAlabs and also from companies.

iDEAlab mentors participated in this competition are experts with experience in supporting development of innovative ideas. On the one hand the iDEAlab provided young and successful entrepreneurs as mentors, who have themselves not too long ago gone through the process and first steps of developing and realising an idea from the scratch. On the other hand, iDEAlab provided senior entrepreneurs or academic staff as mentors for particular problems in the developing process (e.g. in business plan development, marketing strategies etc.). Mentors aimed to support students in the process of developing innovative ideas throughout this competition, suggested ways to generate a startup and provide the experience and savvy they’re missing.

iDEAlab WBC Students’ StartUp Challenge was organized as two joint event dealing with students entrepreneurship and innovation, but from different prospective.

From 24th to 25th of October first part of the event called „The Academy Challenge-Innovation in digital health“ was organized in the cooperation with HORIZON 2020 project STARTIFY7.

STARTIFY7 is a two-year European project intended to train entrepreneurial students to shape their own startups, and provide them with expert support to lead their ideas to concrete achievements. The project has witnessed the application of more than 1400 students, and 280 among them were successfully selected to participate in the seven thematic academies, within environments tailored to push them beyond their limits and own expectations. They had the chance to meet like-minded people and form teams, learn about busuiness development and especially practice entrepreneurship by crossing the frontier.

Teams had an opportunitie to:

Identify a need within health care
Design a solution and prototype
Identify the customer (not user)
Produce a draft lean business plan and value proposition
Pitch idea

It is important to emhasize that STARTIFY7 is coordinated by iDEAlab project partner University of Shefield, United Kingdom.

On 27th of October in the morning a workshop „Preparation for Startup Weekend & Customer Development Workshop“ was organized for all participants and after that students visited the famous IT Company “VEGA IT Sourcing”.

From 28th to 29th of October second part of the event called „Startup Weekend Novi Sad” was organized under the Google franchise.

Startup Weekend Novi Sad was held in the Central building of the University of Novi Sad and this event geather cc 40 students from regional iDEAlabs and more then 30 student from University of Novi Sad. Startup Weekend is an event that, at the same time in different cities around the world, brings together entrepreneurs and those who want to become one, by giving them the opportunity to for just 54 hours turn ideas into practice. The organizers of the fifth SWNS were Business Incubator Novi Sad, nStarter and IDEALab. As in previous years, everyone were welcome to present their ideas and to hear what other participants think about them. A dozen teams whose ideas, in the opinion of most voters were the best, passed through a three-day program which included work with mentors, business model creation, coding, designing and assessment of the market. On the last day, the participants presented their idea to the members of the jury, and the best three teams have won valuable prizes. First place went to a team HiveMind (team from University of Banja Luka), whose idea was to create a software that improves the management of the apiary and increases the efficiency of the beekeeper. Second place went to the team Save Money and Be Fit (team from Technial College of applied sciences from Subotica) , whose idea was to create an application that is based on the measurement of steps during walking, running or cycling. Third place went to the team Lights 4 Life (team from University of Donja Gorica). Their idea was that through a special lighting system that is automatically activated only when necessary, drivers can be alert on time that a pedestrian is on crosswalk. In this way, the problem of a large number of accidents that occur at crosswalk would be solved.

It is important to emhasize that all three winning teams were from iDEAlabs :)