Cowork Timisoara — the story of 2021
We’ve started this year with high hopes. We knew it was going to be a busy one (aka a ‘good’ one) in terms of events and so it was.
The first big event of the year
was the Innovation Labs Hackathon — the first fully online edition of the program. It was also our first edition as organizers of this event, so you can imagine — we’ve had a lot of fun doing this, but also a lot of challenges along the way. Luckily, we’re in this business for a while and we’re the kind of people that see challenges as opportunities for growth and development.
What came out of this program? Five of the ten teams that entered the program made it into the finals (you can watch the recording of the event right here), and one of them (Vboard) won the ‘Scaleup of The Year’ prize.
After Innovation Labs
came the first edition of Startup Survivor — our two-weeks entrepreneurial bootcamp made especially for anyone who wants to go through the process of creating and validating a startup idea from scratch, with no required previous experience whatsoever. It’s quite interesting, you should give it a try if you want to learn more about this process. (You can follow Startup Survivor on Facebook, this way you’ll be the first to know when the next edition will take place.)
The program ended up having three editions this year.
That’s right — three!
A big, well-deserved shoutout to the Startup Survivor organizing team!
In June,
we’ve developed a community hackathon for Ness Digital Engineering: NessTech Community Challenge. The project’s goal was to solve two challenges from the local community — a mainly FrontEnd one (here we wanted to build an interactive platform where high schoolers could find out more about the opportunities the Banat University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine of Timișoara brings to the table), and a mainly BackEnd one (here we wanted to build a management platform for volunteers, designed to be used by various organizations).
Some lessons learned from this project (from the PM’s perspective) can be read right here.
Last year,
we’ve started our collaboration with the Flight Festival team by organizing the Flight Festival Startup Fair. This year we took our collab to the next level by organizing the Startup Fair and — you’ve guessed it — the Tech at Flight Festival hackathon!
The main goal of this project was to help the development of tech solutions on 3 verticals: smart city, tourism and hospitality, culture and creative industries, relevant and with social impact in the community. There were three 5000 eur prizes given to the top three teams competing in this event, one of which was also part of the Innovation Labs pre-acceleration program: CleverEat.
The highlight of the year
was the second edition of Prow Conference — the only digital product conference in Timisoara and our long-term initiative towards helping the local community build better digital products and prowfessionals — as we like to call them.
This year we’ve had 250 attendees (online and offline) and 15 speakers in one day-long conference, plus a full workshops day prior to the conference.
We’ve ended the year
with a University-based project for the student's entrepreneurial department of the Politehnica Timisoara University (InoHub UPT), in which five entrepreneurial projects received scholarships in a total amount of 18.000 ron.
Next to a busy event schedule,
2021 has also brought a shift in people’s work styles. If 2020 was the year of WFH, 2021 showed more balance and a perspective on where things are going: Work From Anywhere!
We’ve also noticed a growth in our local startup ecosystem and we’re proud to say we’re ending 2021 with a coworking space filled with tech entrepreneurs, digital freelancers, agencies, and startups that go from the stage of educational programs (i.e. Startup Survivor, Innovation Labs, Startup Weekend) to raising up pre-seed rounds from our great bunch of angel investors at Growceanu.
And we’ve got have even bigger plans for next year.
So stay tuned!
