Initiative students and residents of Tartu developed innovative business ideas
On 6 and 7 April, the winners of the competition „An Idea is Looking for an Executor!“ were chosen. The grand prize of 2,500 euro was awarded to the team CardSensor, while the title of the Fastest Developer was awarded to Tervis, the team of doctoral students of the University of Tartu, and the team Actual Reports won the Best Presenter Award.
As of the end of February, all initiative people could present their business idea or find a suitable idea and team from the Tartu Science Park and start developing the ideas. The competition culminated with the Pain & Tears Weekend where mentors helped a dozen teams to overcome the bottlenecks of their ideas and turn them profitable. The highlight of the weekend was the Demo Afternoon on Sunday where the teams presented their solutions.
The grand prize was awarded to CardSensor who developed a hardware and software solution for saving the course and results of card games in real time and for easy monitoring and analysis of the course of a game. Seren Eilmann, a judge and a member of the Management Board of the Tartu Science Park, said that they chose CardSensor because of the strength of their team and their will to work hard. “However, it’s also important that the winning team had a clear focus and the range of potential users was large enough to build an international business. The idea where the solution is a niche product but the size of the niche may amount to hundreds of thousands of people managed to steal the hearts of the judges and mentors during the weekend.”
Gerly Kukk, a doctoral student of psychology, and Artur Tamm, a doctoral student of physics in the University of Tartu, demonstrated their amazing ability to develop their business idea and won the award of the Fastest Developer of the Weekend with their project Tervis. The objective of the team was to develop a more efficient and user-friendly health information system and a consistent development and user support system. “Believe me, it’s pure joy to consult and supervise these students with their business ideas. It’s also an example of how we carry out the concept of entrepreneurial university with other business support systems of Tartu,” states Aivar Pere, the UT Business Consultant and the supervisor of doctoral students.
The Best Presenter Award went to Actual Reports which is focused on developing a browser-based design tool enabling to create printouts and reports with various designs and connect the data with different sources, like MS Excel, CSV, JSON, etc.
A presentable range of mentors and judges, consisting of Martin Koppel (Fortumo), Andi Pärn (Estonian University of Life Sciences), Tarvo Tamm (Connect Estonia), Ivar Dembovski (EstBAN) and Seren Eilmann (Tartu Science Park), helped the teams with the development of their ideas.
Tartu Science Park was established in 1992 as one of the first organisation of such nature in the Baltic States. The objective of the Science Park, as a support structure of innovation, is the support of establishment, development and operation of companies focused on science and technology, by providing infrastructural and business development services in the Tartu region.