On the 28th of February around 70 young people gathered to Idea Hackathon organized by the IdeaLab. Idea Hackathon started a new semester of the business ideas development programme STARTER targeted to students interested in entrepreneurship and/or finding team members to start developing a start-up.

Idea Hackathon started with inspirational talks. Ermo Tikk (sTARTUp Community Manager) talked about Tartu startup scene and values, focusing on the benefits of starting a business in Tartu. Madis Vasser (founder of Futuruum and Psychobuss) talked about how to NOT change the world emphasizing the importance of environmental protection while developing new products. Kristjan Eljand (STACC CTO) gave an overview of AI trends and applications.

People with ideas got a chance to pitch and explain their ideas! Altogether there were 17 ideas and the selection was quite impressive! There were plenty of app developing ideas but also many social entrepreneurship and project ideas.

University of Tartu informatics student Krister Looga told that he came with friends and they actually did not have an idea, they had come to listen to the others. But one pitcher seemed an interesting person and when talking to him they came up with a more interesting idea worth testing in STARTER programme. „Within 2 hours we formed a team, defined the customer segment and discussed the potential of the business model“, said Krister.

Inspirational moderator Harald Lepisk encouraged people without a  startup idea to join the team they liked the best and in the next phase, idea validation started. In the final pitching round teams that had enough members (at least 2) and who had found out that their idea might have a place in the market, pitched their ideas.

Last semester winning team TRIT member Ants-Oskar Mäesalu helped to select the most outstanding pitchers of the day: :

•   The best teamwork pitch – ReCon

•   The most attractive call to action pitch – Productivity club

•   The best value proposition pitch – S.A.N.I.

STARTER programme is funded by the European Social Fund.