Another ‘lift-off’ of creative concepts has happened this past weekend within the premises of the Ivanaj Foundations in Tirana. We hosted, for the second year in a row, the 8th edition of “StartUp Live”, the acceleration program, which boosts notions worthy of development, organized again by Faola Hodaj of UNIque Junior Enterprise and her team of volunteers.

Albanian youth that is extremely eager to pursue this and similar opportunities to develop and implement its own ideas, is always on the look out for them and ready to participate. This was again the case of what happened and took place throughout 3 days of last week at our location, from Friday afternoon throughout Sunday evening (June 7-9, 2019).

The entire program was skillfully conducted by Georg Kuttner, an Austrian expert who flew in from Vienna, when ideas were pitched, teams were formed, business models and examples were introduced, and provided the base for the participating applicants to work upon their own ‘new seeds’. They received nurturing advice and suggestions from a group of mentors that dedicated their time to them on Saturday afternoon.

After more than 50 hours of diligent work, the participants had the opportunity of presenting the result of their toil, in front of a 5-member jury that awarded the prizes offered by the sponsoring partners. Our Foundation, guided by its own independent jury, also awarded 2 certificates in recognition of what we chose as the “best potential business ideas”, which entitled the winners with the opportunity of joining our ”Business Incubator Hub”, details of which can be found here.

Our two prizes went to the teams of the project ideas named “Papagalli” the subject of which is the creation of a platform that offers audio books in Albanian language for the children in Diaspora and “Sapientify” for the idea offering online courses by professional teachers.

The closing ceremony included the participation of Mr. Eduard Shalsi, Albania’s Minister of State for the Protection of Entrepreneurship, who also addressed the audience, after Drita Ivanaj thanked all involved in this affair and, while inspiring the participants, wished success to the winners and enticed the others to continue pursuing their dreams!!

You can find the speech of Drita Ivanaj here.