In this November 10-12, Timisoara Software Business Incubator hosted a series of three events involving the local community of IT entrepreneurs, Romanian and foreign early stage investing experts, incubation, innovation and regional development specialists.
All these events were organized in the context of Incubator's participation to ACHIEVE More project, an Europe Innova project aiming to accelerate the growht of KIS (Knowledge-Intensive Service) SMEs in the IT&C sector by bringing them the benefits of high-quality incubation, connecting them from early stages to best clusters, and facilitating their access to innovative models of seed funding. Timisoara Software Business Incubator acts as an associated parter to theproject. At this stage, ACHIEVE More brought together more than 80 participating organizations, built up the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Exchange platform, organized a set of intensive and qualitative trainings, seminar and conferences, produced and distributed a diverse and insightful set of multimedia materials highlighting model entrepreneurs, incubators, clusters and and business support initiatives in the KIS field.
The first event was an Investor Readiness training delivered by Peter Hiscocks and David Gill. Peter Hiscocks, taught entrepreneurship and innovation management at the University of Cambridge for many years. He was Director of the Cambridge Entrepreneurship Centre at the Judge Business School, and Director of Cambridge Enterprise. He currently teaches entrepreneurship as well as working as director of Rivers Capital, a 20 million GBP seed fund for high growth startups. David Gill is Managing Director at St John's Innovation Center, Cambridge. He spent a year as a Sloan Fellow at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in California, and since 2005 has been a partner in ET Capital, a specialist early-stage venture capital fund based in Cambridge. David has co-authored surveys of technology funding in the USA, Israel, Germany and the UK.
The participants to the training were experienced local entrepreneurs from IT companies, young start-ups representatives and also students preparing their future start-ups. First day of the training was rather theoretical, including presentations on reasons to apply for money, the amount needed and kinds of money available, valuation of the business and negotiation. All this topics were important subjects of discussions between the participants. The second day, started with a presentation of the members of the "evaluation jury". Besides David Gill and Peter Hiscocks, the jury was joined by Vlad Stan, of Seed Money and Bucharest Hub, and one of the veterans of the online entrepreneurship in Romania, respectively by Roxana Moldovan, loan analyst at Banca Transilvania, one of the few Romanian banks active in financing start-ups, and that also non-financially supports SMEs community development through the activities of Clubul Inreprinzatorului Roman.
In the working session that followed, the participants prepared their company pitch with coaching
from trainers and the members of the evaluation jury.
The projects developed by the participants considered:
Every project was thoroughly analysed looking for weak points in both technology and marketing components. The needs for conceptual improvement, team structuring and most importantly the business proposition were all evaluated and generated feedback from the experts. Though not planned as a competition the participants could easily make a realistic assessment of their business idea.
In the November 11th, evening, the guests from Achieve More project also participated to the events connected to "Politehnica" University of Timisoara 90th Anniversary.
The second event that took place in the Incubator was the Achieve More Advisory Council, a structure created within the ACHIEVE More project, that group experts from different countries and fields (early stage financing, incubation, clustering, entrepreneurship) that are working together in order to generate policy recommendations to the EU Commission as inputs in the improvement process of the framework for the innovation and technology programs. David Gill, Janis Stabulnieks, Martin Rigby, Michel Bernasconi, Radu Ticiu, members of the Advisory Council were joined by Peter Hiscocks and by local experts Raluca Cibu-Buzac and Daniel Giurea, president of ARIES-TM, all of them benefiting of Sarah Lubik's hard preparatory work.
As a result of the working day, a comprehensive set of policy recommendation were issued, referring to the KIS term coverage, KIS in the context of intellectual property rights, optimizing specific support to KIS companies, building up of specific web-based networking platforms, need for continuation of seed funding development, recognition and support of business angel investment in complementarity with their non-financial, knowledge involvement, enhancing the role
of incubators in cluster structuring and activities, promotion of European entrepreneurial success-stories.
In the evening of November 12th, the program of the Achieve More delegates ended in an informal atmosphere with a new edition of the Incubated Tea, a traditional networking event of Timisoara Software Business Incubator, subtitled Meet the Experts and Achieve More. Besides
representatives of the incubated companies and some of the participants to the Investor Readiness Training, other local young entrepreneurs and students interested in IT entrepreneurship were invited to meet the visiting experts. Following all participants introduction, Peter, David, Janis, Michel and Martin exposed a set of short but insightful and often funny stories from their personal experiences with startups. The evening continued with one-2-one and small groups discussions that contributed to the highly motivational character of the meeting.
Following their intense presence in Timisoara Software Business Incubator, the Achieve More experts expressed very positive opinions about Timisoara as a city hosting a vibrant local IT entrepreneurial movement, about the Incubator as a startup supporting hub, and the very promising incubated companies. As an insider information, it can be disclosed that couple of local startups were "bookmarked" by the experts active as early stage investors as worth to follow as prospects for investment.
More pictures shot during the events are available on Timisoara Software Business Incubator's Facebook page, here.
All these events were organized in the context of Incubator's participation to ACHIEVE More project, an Europe Innova project aiming to accelerate the growht of KIS (Knowledge-Intensive Service) SMEs in the IT&C sector by bringing them the benefits of high-quality incubation, connecting them from early stages to best clusters, and facilitating their access to innovative models of seed funding. Timisoara Software Business Incubator acts as an associated parter to theproject. At this stage, ACHIEVE More brought together more than 80 participating organizations, built up the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Exchange platform, organized a set of intensive and qualitative trainings, seminar and conferences, produced and distributed a diverse and insightful set of multimedia materials highlighting model entrepreneurs, incubators, clusters and and business support initiatives in the KIS field.
The first event was an Investor Readiness training delivered by Peter Hiscocks and David Gill. Peter Hiscocks, taught entrepreneurship and innovation management at the University of Cambridge for many years. He was Director of the Cambridge Entrepreneurship Centre at the Judge Business School, and Director of Cambridge Enterprise. He currently teaches entrepreneurship as well as working as director of Rivers Capital, a 20 million GBP seed fund for high growth startups. David Gill is Managing Director at St John's Innovation Center, Cambridge. He spent a year as a Sloan Fellow at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in California, and since 2005 has been a partner in ET Capital, a specialist early-stage venture capital fund based in Cambridge. David has co-authored surveys of technology funding in the USA, Israel, Germany and the UK. The participants to the training were experienced local entrepreneurs from IT companies, young start-ups representatives and also students preparing their future start-ups. First day of the training was rather theoretical, including presentations on reasons to apply for money, the amount needed and kinds of money available, valuation of the business and negotiation. All this topics were important subjects of discussions between the participants. The second day, started with a presentation of the members of the "evaluation jury". Besides David Gill and Peter Hiscocks, the jury was joined by Vlad Stan, of Seed Money and Bucharest Hub, and one of the veterans of the online entrepreneurship in Romania, respectively by Roxana Moldovan, loan analyst at Banca Transilvania, one of the few Romanian banks active in financing start-ups, and that also non-financially supports SMEs community development through the activities of Clubul Inreprinzatorului Roman.In the working session that followed, the participants prepared their company pitch with coaching
from trainers and the members of the evaluation jury.
The projects developed by the participants considered:
- a customized web form generation platform
- the creation of a new payment method for the parking system with the use of mobile phone
- an innovative wordpress application designed for blogers
- an event customization website
- a music video online community
Every project was thoroughly analysed looking for weak points in both technology and marketing components. The needs for conceptual improvement, team structuring and most importantly the business proposition were all evaluated and generated feedback from the experts. Though not planned as a competition the participants could easily make a realistic assessment of their business idea.In the November 11th, evening, the guests from Achieve More project also participated to the events connected to "Politehnica" University of Timisoara 90th Anniversary.
The second event that took place in the Incubator was the Achieve More Advisory Council, a structure created within the ACHIEVE More project, that group experts from different countries and fields (early stage financing, incubation, clustering, entrepreneurship) that are working together in order to generate policy recommendations to the EU Commission as inputs in the improvement process of the framework for the innovation and technology programs. David Gill, Janis Stabulnieks, Martin Rigby, Michel Bernasconi, Radu Ticiu, members of the Advisory Council were joined by Peter Hiscocks and by local experts Raluca Cibu-Buzac and Daniel Giurea, president of ARIES-TM, all of them benefiting of Sarah Lubik's hard preparatory work.As a result of the working day, a comprehensive set of policy recommendation were issued, referring to the KIS term coverage, KIS in the context of intellectual property rights, optimizing specific support to KIS companies, building up of specific web-based networking platforms, need for continuation of seed funding development, recognition and support of business angel investment in complementarity with their non-financial, knowledge involvement, enhancing the role
of incubators in cluster structuring and activities, promotion of European entrepreneurial success-stories.Following the working session a short tour of the Incubator took place, where several of the incubated companies were invited to present their projects and activities to the Achieve More visitors. There were interesting discussions on respective businesses internationalization potential and in couple of cases cooperation leads were identified.
In the evening of November 12th, the program of the Achieve More delegates ended in an informal atmosphere with a new edition of the Incubated Tea, a traditional networking event of Timisoara Software Business Incubator, subtitled Meet the Experts and Achieve More. Besides
representatives of the incubated companies and some of the participants to the Investor Readiness Training, other local young entrepreneurs and students interested in IT entrepreneurship were invited to meet the visiting experts. Following all participants introduction, Peter, David, Janis, Michel and Martin exposed a set of short but insightful and often funny stories from their personal experiences with startups. The evening continued with one-2-one and small groups discussions that contributed to the highly motivational character of the meeting.Following their intense presence in Timisoara Software Business Incubator, the Achieve More experts expressed very positive opinions about Timisoara as a city hosting a vibrant local IT entrepreneurial movement, about the Incubator as a startup supporting hub, and the very promising incubated companies. As an insider information, it can be disclosed that couple of local startups were "bookmarked" by the experts active as early stage investors as worth to follow as prospects for investment.
More pictures shot during the events are available on Timisoara Software Business Incubator's Facebook page, here.
