In case you were wondering what happened on the grand day of the 21st of February, and no, we aren’t talking about the UBER coming to Iasi (finally, thanks God though), the answer is IdeaJAM powered by Innovation Labs and Asociatia Calemis.
What is Innovation Labs? Quick, short answer: the biggest tech start-up pre-accelerator in Romania.
The sixth edition of IdeaJAM took place last Thursday at the Faculty of Computer Science and we’ve noticed a surprising boost of our start-up community. Follow us in this journey and you’ll see what we’re talking about. The fifth IdeaJAM edition took place in the same amphitheater, just 3 months ago. At that time we had 9 teams who presented their innovative ideas, and 40 people who attended. Good enough for a 3 hour event. But last Thursday, we were glad to have 14 teams who presented their start-up ideas. We were 70 souls in that room, 70 different people, with different backgrounds, who gathered there with a purpose, and that was to help each other through feedback to embrace innovation and make it work for our ideas.
Also, we’ve witnessed the true power of example. After those 8 registered teams did their well-structured pitches, 6 more people from the audience got the courage to present their own ideas, without any preparation rearwards. And two of them even won a prize.
The juries and the audience also, did their best to help the teams. They all came with advices, guidance and constructive questions based on their years of experience trying to bring the idea closer to reality. There are no bad ideas, just bad implementations, but with a little help from the experts, young innovators, they will learn the right way to polish it.
IT is in vogue and Iasi became a hub of programmers, but at IdeaJAM, the diversity of the ideas was unbelievable, from social help to real estate, pharmaceutical, to media and copyright. We gotta say, people from this beautiful city are really unique and have some innovative and pragmatic solutions for the real day by day problems. Even though initially, there were only 3 winners, the juries decided to give a special prize. We really don’t blame them, the decision must have been really hard, taking into consideration the fact that all those 14 ideas were so good.
You can refuse to trust us, we might have post-event excitement syndrome but you can not ignore what the participants and the jury have to say:
We are encouraging all the ideas, including the ones who didn’t won a prize or even those that has not participated, to come at the Innovation Labs 2019 Iasi Hackathon, so they can prepare their first MVP together with dozen of mentors ready to give from their knowledge about tech, business, and entrepreneurship. The lucky winner will make it to the 3-month pre-acceleration program, Innovation Labs, to become a start-up ready to launch.
Have some faith in you, you’ll never know how many people are watching you as an example.
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