Lab2Market @ Tecnico, an innovation acceleration programme organised by Técnico in partnership with Everis and i-deals, took place during three intensive days, providing participants with learning, reflection, improvement of ideas and effective ways to prepare for a product launch. This programme is organised by the Technology Transfer Office at Técnico and will involve more 247 working days.
Professor Luís Caldas de Oliveira, Vice-president of Técnico for Entrepreneurship and Corporate Relations, led the session and presented the three selected projects – LiderA2SMT (LiderA to Sustainable Management of Tourism in Urban Area), Biklio (Bike with benefits) and LiderA2SMT (LiderA to Sustainable Management of Tourism in Urban Area). All teams were taking notes in dozens of coloured post-its according to the group’s reflection and the feedback from the invited consultants.
Product features, customer profile, market delineation and strategic gains were improved by the groups, after the questions asked by the several consultants from Everis and i-deals. In the second day, Angel Diaz expressed the satisfaction of his team “in working with young people with very good ideas.” “We will help you to improve your project”, added Rui Machado from Everis.
Filipa Bernardino, Matheus Oliveira, Maria Martins and João Bernardino were the members of Biklio, a free application that “rewards users when they are cycling,” detecting activity through vibration without GPS. After Biklio reached the market in late 2017 and have already a considerable number of users as well as partner stores, the team decided to participate in this workshop with a view to the opportunities that this might entail.
“We decided to attend this workshop because we were very interested in learning more, especially marketing strategies, because we are all engineers” explains Filipa Bernardino. “Participating in this workshop was very useful because we had an idea but we realised that we have to focus on increasing the network, and here we have learnt how to do that”, she adds. After the feedback, the team is more confident and prepared to strengthen” this link to the market, which is undoubtedly important for the product development and for what comes next” says the entrepreneur. “I think startups should spend time participating in this type of initiatives because, after all, it’s an investment”, she concludes.
The first phase of Lab2Market @ Tecnico prepared the team for the next steps. It is intended that, in the coming weeks, the teams apply the market strategy they learnt in this session. The next meeting is scheduled for March 1, but this time learning will be based on “field work”.
