The two-week long DOERS School launched on August 2. This year, it was implemented together with the *ship startup festival in Finland in the framework of the Twin Campus project funded by the EU, Russia, and Finland within the 2014-2020 South-East Finland – Russia Cross-Border Cooperation Program.

The school was held online and fully in English. A total of 20 people, including ITMO students, took part. The participants formed small teams and worked on their projects.

The participants attended lectures by experts and solved practical tasks. Daniil Kislinskiy, founder of Go Global World, discussed the creation of business models and ways to monetize your project; Sabine Suorsa, entrepreneur and co-founder of Patteri Entrepreneurship Society delivered a lecture on how to evaluate and analyze your competitors, and Maxim Makarov, business consultant and mentor at ITMO Accelerator, shared insights on customer development (testing the product to see if it’ll be in demand).

Four out of five teams managed to complete the program, present in front of the jury at the demo day, and reach the finals.

“The teams went through a lot: each day, they worked on their project and presented the results for the jury. I would like to especially thank our speakers: Daniil Kislinskiy, Kirill Kovalev, Sabine Suorsa, Minna Nieminen, Konstantin Khomchenko, and Igor Kuprienko, for the invaluable experience that they’ve shared with our students,” says Maxim Makarov, the school’s expert.

The first place was shared by two teams: Collectible Auction and Tamagotchi Earth. Collectible Auction came up with a concept for a monthly international online auction.

Tamagotchi Earth, developed by Arina Dorofeeva, a student at ITMO’s Faculty of Infocommunication Technologies, is an app that illustrates how people’s food habits influence the climate and helps users adopt a more eco-friendly lifestyle using gamification.

The second place was taken by the Tag: IT team. Its members presented a tracker with NFC and Bluetooth 5.1; it helps track various objects to find them quickly.

The Heavy Mecha’s team project of a robotized platform made out of reusable materials took third place.

All winners received prizes: an opportunity to take part in ITMO Accelerator and tickets to the *ship interactive startup festival, participants of which get a chance to join mentorship programs and take part in the Pitch Captain Competition with the main prize of €5,000.

Participants and experts of the school told ITMO.NEWS how to learn the basics of innovative entrepreneurship in practice and win a ticket to *ship.

Maksim Makarov, the school’s key expert

The teams presented their solutions to each other and received feedback before they showed them to the speakers. In such a way, the participants have developed their projects in practice and studied the basics of innovative entrepreneurship. This was an intensive process and not everyone has reached the finals. Tag: IT, Collective Auction, Heavy Mecha, and Tamagotchi Earth were the strongest teams. They have presented their projects at the demo day and reached the final stage of the school that includes a presentation at the *ship international startup festival.

I would also like to thank the organizers, Aleksandra Protsenko and Musa Nuryshev, as well as the School’s volunteers. Thanks to them, the school was exciting and went smoothly.

Another important feature of this international event was the cooperation with XAMK University (South-Eastern Finland University of Applied Sciences) and *ship festival (Kotka, Finland). Such collaborations are always a boost for the school’s participants and working with such partners is a pleasure.

Arina Dorofeeva, Tamagotchi Earth project

I’ve developed a mobile app that illustrates what kind of impact our habits have on our planet. It helps gradually change your lifestyle to make it more eco-friendly using gamification.

Each user has a Tamagotchi Planet with indicators such as greenhouse pollution, the amount of used water, and the size of areas used for food production. Each metric changes depending on the user’s food habits.

Users can reach goals, such as lowering the consumption of some products, and gain bonuses for that: extra points for ecology-related subjects at the university or promo codes for partner stores. They move up in the joint ranking of all users and improve metrics of their planet. Plus they can learn more about the relevant ecological problems. The articles available in the app are supplemented by visualizations and statistics to give users a clearer picture of how important it is to change their habits.

Anton Blik, Tag: IT project

I had the idea for a microtracker for a long time. I enjoyed the fact that we learned to make pitch presentations and it was also great to find out how to promote your product, work with customers, perform customer development, and other aspects related to product management. As a result, our team took second place and will be a part of the *ship festival. Moreover, we have received an invitation to join ITMO Accelerator – I’ve always wanted to develop my business idea there.