17 December 2009
| Timişoara, Romania
In the period from December 5th to January 11th 2009, Timişoara Software Business Incubator (Romania) runs the IT Startup Generator project, a project aiming to promote a multidisciplinary approach in own-product/own-service focused IT entrepreneurship as an alternative to IT outsourcing-oriented business approach. Outsourcing is still very common amongst Western Romanian ICT companies.
The project involves 24 students from IT and non-IT departments of Timişoara Vest & "Politehnica" Universities that where selected after a week-long series of incubator and project presentation at the respective universities. The 24 students have enrolled for a series of seven training sessions plus team project development activities.
Following a brainstorming session that resulted in a pool of potential projects, participating students split into four mixed teams (IT & non-IT backgrounds) working towards the proof of concepts and business plans for the following four projects:
- A portal for promotion and auctioning of the art works of young Timişoara artists.
- A community portal for the use of the expanding local community of bicycle drivers (offering GPS-based trip planning, tracking, analysis, reporting, anti-theft facilities, etc.).
- Local/regional event promotion and administration portal.
- Portal for questionnaire generation, administration, and analysis.
During the seven planned sessions the participants receive specific knowledge on IT business development (technical, marketing, economics, legal skills) from local experts and practitioners, complemented with inputs from visiting specialists from Bucharest and abroad.
Another component of the program refers to presentations of "personal entrepreneurial stories" by successful young individuals involved in different types of IT ventures: highly professional freelancers that developed complex products that are sold worldwide (SU Podium, realized by Octavian Chis of plugins Ltd), start-up founders (Mile Rosu & Andrei Marin of Dream Production), young CEOs of more established companies (Adrian Erimescu of Realmedia, co-owner of VC backed Romania's no 1 real-estate portal imobiliare.ro).
The four projects will be pitched on 11 January 2009 in front of a panel of entrepreneurs and experts.
As medium and long-term outcomes of the project the organizers are "betting" on a better promotion of the Timişoara Software Business Incubator in local universities and also on new incubation applicant 'pipeline' generation. If the project will prove successful it will be included in the incubator's permanent activities, with quarterly or semestrial new editions.
Through this project Timişoara Software Business Incubator's contributes to the beginning of an acutely needed process of local economic development paradigm shift from focusing on foreign corporate investments for outsourcing services to supporting local innovative start-ups able to build up competitive products and to generate high value-adding services to local, regional and global clients.