Cookies Policy
The website need some cookies and similar means to function. If you permit us, we will use those means to collect data on your visits for aggregated statistics to improve our service. Find out More
Accept Reject
  • Menu
    Article

    The 3rd and last edition of BIP came to an end

    The last session of the 3rd edition of the Business Ignition Programme (BIP) took place on 19 April at the Faculty of Sports of the University of Porto with the presentation of the finalists’ ideas, with the first two places being given to projects of CIIMAR - Interdisciplinary Centre of Marine and Environmental Research.

    07th June 2018

    BIP, which is developed by INESC TEC’s Centre for Innovation, Technology and Entrepreneurship (CITE), is a programme of business models iteration for technologies developed in the academia and has the participation of U.Porto Innovation and CIIMAR.

    The winning team was distinguished with a prize of EUR 1,500. Five scholarships for the European Innovation Academy worth of EUR 8,500 given through the partnership of the University of Porto and Santander Universities were also granted to the best two teams and to three selected members.

    The winners

    The winning work of this edition is SNACK Probiotics: Sporeformer’s Natural Antimicrobial Compounds as the key to control aquaculture diseases and consists in the proposal to use probiotics as feed additives in order to improve the water quality by reducing antibiotic residues in the environment and contributing to the sustainability of aquaculture. The goal is to license these bacterial strains and its marketing and incorporation in species.

    The second award was given to the BioIDkits – Molecular kits for biological identifications project, an idea that has already given rise to IDENTIFICA company, which develops kits for companies and labs that identify the components of foodstuffs, detect pathogens and invasive species, characterize domestic species, among other services. In the context of this work, the Porto Business School partner also offers an MBA Magellan to the project leader, Filipe Pereira from CIIMAR.

    INESC TEC participation

    This edition of BIP was attended by two teams which were composed by INESC TEC elements.

    Air.CRAFT – Enabling design and tradition to fly together by Inclusion Co-Creation Labs - was the project presented by Andreia Passos, Cristina Barbosa, Jamil Farkat, Joep van der Wal and José Coelho Rodrigues, researchers from CITE - Centre for Innovation, Technology and Entrepreneurship. It is a platform that gathers designers and traditional craftspeople. For designers, the goal is to innovate traditional products and for the craftspeople to suppress a need and to have access to promotional and market methodologies.

    Tiago Guedes Santos, from CRACS - Centre for Research in Advanced Computing Systems, Rui Silva and Catarina Ferreira presented the Imagogio - Automatic detection and classification of objects in image and video, a project which is characterised by giving companies the opportunity to implement technological solutions into their products without the need to recruit specialist, overcoming the difficulties inherent to the manual analysis of images and video.

    BIP – Business Ignition Programme

    From February to April, the selected teams worked on their value proposals for their projects with the support of mentors, methodologies and resources that helped them transform innovative technologies into profitable business models in order to improve the adequacy of their solutions to specific market problems and consumers and even to develop its corporate image. Twelve weeks later, the teams presented their pitch to the public and to the jury panel who was responsible for selecting the winning proposals.

    Besides the presentation of 11 business ideas, the attendees had the opportunity to see the keynote speech by Johnny Cartucho, who attended the European Innovation Academy in 2017. In the end, the participants could network with each other.

    Looking back to what has been done, INESC TEC was involved in the three editions of BIP with eight teams, in a total of 19 participants. Among the awards are the grant of an MBA, two trips of EUR 1,200 each and a monetary prize of EUR 1,500.

    Identify market opportunities to new products/services that can arise from research works. Provide necessary skills to the value creation and marketing. Create new business opportunities. These were BIP’s goals during its start-up in 2017. According to the organisation, the goals were met and the initiative was a success.

    The researchers mentioned in this news piece are associated with INESC TEC and UTFPR.