Marina Malyutina welcoming the participants

On 24 May, the public space “Boiling Point” of the State University of Aviation Instrumentation hosted the final event of the first stage of the TechnoPiter accelerator. Marina Malyutina, Head of the SPbGASU Division for Student Entrepreneurship and Career, addressed the audience with a welcoming speech. “Students of the University of Architecture and Civil Engineering continue to actively develop their entrepreneurial skills, and TechnoPiter helps them to do it. The program is perfect for startups that are at the stage of formulating an idea and finding a target audience for their product. We are proud of our students who completed the entire program of the first stage and today are presenting their pilot projects at the pitch session,” she emphasized.

For two months, about 200 SPbGASU students took an educational course from the organizers. The program included consultations with team trackers, master classes, practical assignments and a business cafe with representatives of the entrepreneurial community, a seminar “The Art of Public Speaking” and training on project defense.

Daniil Goncharenko

“The most useful events within the accelerator, in my opinion, were those formats that involved live communication with business representatives or team trackers. For example, consultations and a business cafe,” noted pitch session participant Daniil Goncharenko, a student at the SPbGASU Faculty of Environmental Engineering and Municipal Services, leader of a team developing the idea of ​​​​organizing an architectural bureau, the main product of which is interactive visualization of future real estate objects.

The teams were offered a choice of one of three areas of the National Technology Initiative: Homenet, Healthnet and Aeronet. For the students of our university, the most interesting and suitable direction was “Homenet”, within which they proposed many interesting and promising topics: from a service for flexible hiring of personnel in construction to new dry building mixtures for drilling injection systems.

83 SPbGASU students in 21 teams, including interuniversity ones, reached the final pitch session of the first season.

“TechnoPiter turned out to be a challenge for us, but at the same time it gave us important practical skills in entrepreneurship. We are very glad that we took advantage of this opportunity, spoke at the pitch session, gained experience and presented our project to the audience. We performed to get feedback from people with different points of view, and we achieved this,” Nikita Kazantsev, a student at the SPbGASU Faculty of Automobile and Road Building, shared his impressions.

The pitch session resulted in 12 startup ideas from our university students to advance to the next fall season. Their authors will continue to work on their projects and will defend them at the final demo day at the end of November.

“Participation in the event helped me refine my final qualifying work, which I am defending within the “Startup as a Diploma” project. The expert comments allowed me to correct the shortcomings,” said Ka Kumba, a student at the SPbGASU Faculty of Economics and Management.

However, the possibility of defending a project in a startup format is not the only option for developing a project created at the accelerator. Students can also receive a grant of RUB 1 million. from the Innovation Promotion Foundation, an invitation to an internship at a partner company.

The TechnoPiter accelerator is part of the ecosystem of youth technological entrepreneurship, which has been forming at our university since the beginning of this year and allows us to create conditions for the formation of entrepreneurial competencies, the development of project activities, strengthens connections with industry partners and practice-oriented training.