BBA students get into action at Student Startup Camp

From 3-9th February 2014, in co-operation with University of Tartu, Garage48 organized a Student Startup Camp, a practical entrepreneurship course that also involved students from FEBA.

After pitching ideas, forming teams and a week worth of work, students pitched their ideas and showed done prototypes to the jury. CropHealer, a mobile application for farmers which helps to detect problems with plants, stood out and won the first Student Startup Camp competition. Maiden team, a cardgame based on reallife events, was announced as the runner-up.

Dloggr that included three 1st year students of Business Administration: Uku Lilleväli, Mykyta Gorskykh and Kostyantyn Turchak got a special prize for the best social media presence and got advertising budget from 7Blaze.

Besides lot's of teamwork and one-on-one mentoring to refine problems and ideas into web or mobile app prototypes and business plans, the weeklong camp included a series of seminars covering topics ranging from rapid application development to marketing and social media, entrepreneurial attitude, marketing and social media, user-centered design and start-up life.

65 students joined the camp and pitched 25 ideas ranging from genome tracker services to mobile applications for farmers. 10 ideas managed to gather enough support to form a team, who then started the work towards building their prototypes.

At the end of the week, students pitched their ideas and prototypes to the jury consisting of Krists Avots, head of operations of Garage48, Kalev Kaarna, manager of the Idea Lab in University of Tartu, Sneppo Sneck, the CEO of SmartCap and Elise Sass, Start-up Lead at Microsoft in Central-Eastern Europe.

"It was the first time in Estonia, where entrepreneurial education was combined with hackathon format. This allowed young entrepreneurs learn rapid software business idea development," said Kalev Kaarna, manager of Idea Lab in University of Tartu.

Initial feedback during the demonight showed lot's of promise and positive attitude towards the event. "Lots of friends, great team for executing a great idea, future partners, a job offer, positive emotions and much more - that's just a scratch of everything I gained during the 7 days of the Startup Camp," comments Uku Lilleväli, student of Business Administration from the team of Dloggr, "I'd even say it's one of the most exciting and inspirational projects I've ever been to."

Another team member, Mykyta Gorskykh had this to say as well: „The atmosphere was perfect and everyone was involved in work. For me, it was a great experience and I gained a lot in team work. The main aspect of this camp for students was to try to create something new and interesting and I think that every team understood that everything is possible with the help of strong desire."

Read more about the Student Startup Camp: http://bit.ly/ssc-blog or http://startupcamp.edicy.co/