Mobile Monday Estonia, Successful Workshop Introduction
Today we had another of these events, which present a nice opportunity for networking people from industry, entrepreneurs, and university in the mobile world (link to MoMo-website.). We (about 40 people) met in Ülikooli Kohvik for talks about "How Does a Student Project Grow into a Successful Mobile Service Provider", networking, and a little workshop.
I personally think it was a great choice to replace the former panel discussion with a little workshop. It offers a great and much more personal opportunity to network. And thanks to the organizers to respect our suggestions.
I was in charge of leading one of the workshops and I think I should share the results with you here. Our team set out to answer the following questions:
As a startup in mobile IT:
- How to find industrial/university partners?
- How to find the right team members?
- How to bring research to real life?
- How to get funding?
After an active discussion we agreed mainly on three solution areas:
- networking and communication
- financing and funding
- legal and structural issues
Most important in the networking and communication part were for us the following points:
- Universities should not hesitate to approach companies to offer their services
And vice versa interested people from industry are very welcome to talk to us at university (if you don't know to whom, just write to me).
- More events like Mobile Monday would be very appreciated, it would be good to have also events covering other areas of it
- Some Founder's Table would be nice (read more on this below, we are actually planning to found one in Tartu)
- University should market and point out their role more in successfully industrialized projects
- University should actively support students wanting to do a startup
- Institutionalizing a required internship in IT studies might give a way out to loosing students to industry at an too early point
In financing and funding:
- There is currently a lot of public funding available. Pairing up industry in the public sector (like university) incresas the chance of getting funding significantly.
- It could be good to lobby for a venture capital company assigned to the university which could support startups, bu being able to act more economic than the public institution university is able to
In legal in structural issues we were mentioning again the legal restriction in terms of acquiring profit for the university and possibilities to change this.
As several people expressed their wish to create some Founder's Table, I will hereby just try to establish one. We will meet the first time at 18:30 in Ülikoolikohvik at Tuesday the 14th of April. The meeting will last until about 21:00. We will try to continue networking and maybe continue discussing the topics of the workshop outlined here. However any other ideas what to discuss can be brought in and be addressed. In the evening I will create a little subpage of this page with more infos (the subpage is here). Therefore, if you are interested, please start monitoring this site, or drop me a note or email (see my contacts).
As Priit linked this page directly and not my blog, here is a backlink to my blog, where you can also leave comments: