Carmen Bacariza Rey and Victoria Corregidor, participants of Lab2Market@Técnico 2020, attended the presentation session held this Wednesday, 3rd February.
The session was also attended by the president of Técnico, professor Rogério Colaço, the Vice-president of Técnico for Operations and Enterprise Relationships, professor Pedro Amaral, the CEO of everis Portugal and Técnico alumnus, engineer Tiago Barroso, the deputy director of the iStartLab, professor Luís Caldas de Oliveira, and the i-deals mentoring team.
The president of Técnico thanked everis for the support and highlighted the importance of this innovation acceleration program, which is a “unique opportunity” so that the ideas developed at Técnico “can acquire even greater value”.
Engineer Tiago Barroso highlighted the strong link between everis Portugal and Instituto Superior Técnico, “where we recruit most of our talents”, said the CEO of everis Portugal. “I see this program as a way of giving back to Técnico the training of these talented people”, he added.
Professor Pedro Amaral highlighted the potential of this program given the results achieved. “There has been very good progress throughout this initiative. We have developed new startups, new projects have evolved, we have reached the market with more strength”, he said.
The two participants in last year’s edition highlighted the value that Lab2Market added to their projects. “When we started the program, we realised that we had to rethink our research”, said Carmen Bacariza Rey, CQE researcher and “Cathpro” project spokeswoman. “The program allowed us to get in touch with people who look things in different perspective, and that was something we very much appreciated,” she added. According to the CQE researcher, the program forced them to reflect on important aspects such as: “Is our technology competitive?, How do we stand out from other commercial solutions already available? Is the market really interested in our idea?, Is our project economically viable?”. The ability to improve the project value proposition, to develop a business model, and how Lab2Market @ Técnico helped them to improve current and future applications for funding within different funding programmes were some of the lessons learned underlined by Carmen Bacariza Rey.
“I strongly recommend that you participate in this program because you will learn many things that are not related to science, but that are very useful”, said Victoria Corregidor, C2TN researcher and Science for Culture Heritage (SHC) project spokeswoman.
Alberto Cortez and Rocío Pacios, from i-deals, explained how this year’s edition will work and its advantages, and clarified some doubts.
Lab2Market@Técnico aims to identify projects developed by IST students (MSc and PhD), researchers and faculty, with a market-oriented and practical approach. The selected teams will receive 250 hours of expert consulting services. Applications for Lab2Market @ Técnico 2021 run until 12th February.
