Career - Power Your Future
EESTEC Startup Lab Light up your idea!
LC Sarajevo March 10th - March 17th 2014
Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Text: Amina Žgalj, LC Sarajevo
Photographs: LC Sarajevo
The best way to get a winning business idea
is to not think of any. Instead, you should be
looking at which problems you can solve. But
sometimes it is not only important to come up
with a great idea, it is more important to know
how to turn that idea into something people would actually want. Therefore, in March
2014, EESTEC LC Sarajevo organized the first
EESTEC Startup Lab workshop. This event
aimed to show young people how to realize
their business ideas.
Thirteen ambitious members of EESTEC, from
all around Europe, had the opportunity to attend lectures by cutting edge mentors who
work for an startup accelerator from Sarajevo, and who are real professionals at making
startups great.
They talked about the startup culture and
how to select the right business idea. Also the
shared their experience in the business world
and pointed out all the benefits and shortcomings of being an entrepreneur.
Motivated by the lecture, our participants
moved on to the first part of the workshop,
which represented the selection of business
ideas they consider interesting and for which
they believe to have the potential to become a
successful web applications.
Demonstrating their creativity and entrepreneurial spirit, our participants came up with
three innovative ideas: One photo, one solution, Energy saver or Play, not play.
three initial business ideas and made the
same ready for implementation.
Realization of those ideas was reflected in the
creation of original web applications using the
open-source web framework-Ruby on Rails.
To prepare them the best as possible for individual work on the prototype for their applications participants had the opportunity
to hear the lecture on programming web applications in Ruby on Rails. This part of the
workshop was held by a professional lecturer,
who through simple and easy steps tried to
explain the basics of programming in Ruby to
our participants.
During the Closing ceremony, participants
presented their web applications and business plans that they have been working on
during the five-day academic part of the workshop.
Besides the academic part there were, of
course, many other things which marked this
event-memories which participants carried
home with them.
They had the opportunity to see the rich Bosnian culture and heritage and enjoy Bosnia’s
extraordinary cuisine. In the evenings participants had the chance to relax and experience
Sarajevo’s nightlife.
For all future entrepreneurs know this: if you’re
not willing to risk, you cannot grow. If you
cannot grow, you cannot be your best. If you
cannot be your best, you cannot be happy.
If you cannot be happy, what else is there?
After that participants were divided into
groups, so that each group of participants
along with mentors elaborated one of the
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