Ideas for student start-ups

The competition summing up the first semester of the new course called Academic Entrepreneurship, which is scheduled for the last semester of bachelor studies, included all students who had participated in the course. The rules were simple: as part of the classes, students were asked to come up with and develop a project that they believed would be likely to succeed on the market, and the tutors selected the best ones from all classes implemented. Their authors had an opportunity to present their work during a seminar organized in the Wrocław Technology Park which concluded the first semester of the course.

- The classes involved over 1,100 people from the entire university. About 350 start-up projects have been created. We wanted them to be connected with the profile of our University, i.e. to be connected with the broadly understood area of natural sciences – says Professor Mirosław Miller and adds that he was sure that among such a large number of projects there would certainly be some very interesting ideas.

And indeed – the first place went to the project called "Heavy metal bioindicators” by Klaudia Bukowiec, Patryk Józefiak and Kamila Liman – students of biotechnology master studies.

- We called them BioRid. They were supposed to be cheap, handy and easy to use, i.e. in the form of a small vial into which a small amount of homogenised food could be placed and tested for lead or cadmium content – explain Klaudia Bukowiec and Patryk Józefiak.

Their winning project came out from a brainstorm with students from other departments of their parent Faculty of Biotechnology and Food Sciences. – It turned out that what we eat is becoming more and more important to us, i.e. quality, nutritional values, but also safety. Colleagues in the field of human nutrition told us that root vegetables accumulate heavy metals, which they absorb from soil and water. According to the nutrition pyramid, vegetables should be an essential part of our daily diet and this led us straight to our vial which will allow us to check whether a carrot bought in a particular supermarket chain, a greengrocer or directly from the farmer is safe – explain Klaudia and Patryk, who admit that their idea was also the result of their participation in another project, carried out under the guidance of prof. Zbigniew Lazar. UPWr students invented biological filters based on modified microorganisms that absorb heavy metals and signal their excessive concentration by turning red and giving off a peach odour. And then they took them to a competition in the United States, from which they brought a bronze medal.

- This trip gave us confidence and inspired us. If you can clean the air, why not test food? – Klaudia and Patryk smile.

Biotechnology students make it clear that the new subject was a mystery to everyone. – But Professor Wrzecioniarz’s classes were fantastic. He did not instruct but asked questions that led us to the solution of a problem. In addition, for the first time we were able to look at our own ideas from a purely practical, marketing side. Do they have a chance of success? How to calculate their profitability? This is knowledge that will definitely pay off when we start looking for an interesting job - emphasize Klaudia Bukowiec and Patryk Józefiak.

The second place in the competition was granted to the project of Paulina Perwenis, Szymon Grajcar and Jakub Górka, students of spatial planning and landscape architecture, who developed a business plan for an enterprise dealing with the design, preparation and installation of modern ecological bus shelters harvesting rainwater. The idea referred to the knowledge acquired during engineering studies, but was also a response to the challenges posed by climate change.

- We wanted to create something for the urban space, something that would combine aesthetic and ecological function. Greenery cleans the air, reduces stress, lowers the temperature of urban heat islands and simply has a beneficial effect on people – explains Jakub Górka. And Paulina Perwenis adds: - We know one another, we've already worked on various projects, but for the first time we had to give our vision a concrete shape and assess the economic aspect of our undertaking.

Second place winners admit that it is cool to come up with an interesting project, but it is much more difficult to develop a realistic framework for it: what kind of investment it will require, how much profit it will bring, and if it will have a positive impact on the environment.

- The most difficult moment came when we started calculating all the costs. It seemed to us that we did not need any huge amounts, but it turned out that the expenses were considerable. It is important to understand profitability of an enterprise – admits Jakub Górka, and Paulina Perwenis adds: - We hope that this experience will pay off when we start looking for a job. And the fact that we were one of the most distinguished teams gave us confidence and motivated us to continue working. We have never been so much appreciated before and it has been a positive impulse.

A food product for vegans, or a plant “kefir”, is an idea that won the third place. Michalina Grębowiec, Angelika Łacińska and Joanna Maziakowska, students of food technology and human nutrition, have "followed" trends.

- More and more people are switching to veganism and looking for the right products for themselves. Initially, we were thinking of a vegetable cheese, but eventually we decided to develop an entire concept of producing a fermented vegetable drink based on cashew nuts and sunflower seeds. The name "kefir" is reserved for a dairy product in which fermentation is based on lactic bacteria, but we used it to let the consumer know what to expect – explain the winners of the third place and immediately point out that in their drink the lactic bacteria were replaced in the fermentation process by the tea mushroom (kombucha), and because of the deficiency of nutrients in the vegan diet, they are considering adding calcium and vitamin B12.

Joanna and her friends admit that participating in the competition was not only an interesting experience for them, but also an opportunity to present their ideas during the seminar in the Wrocław Technology Park. - It's a great experience when you know that it is not only your teachers from the university that are listening to you but also entrepreneurs and businesspeople – smile the girls.

One of the awards in the competition went to renewable energy and waste management students. Agata Mostek, Kinga Gajdosz, Aleksandra Stonoga, Patrycja Jurańczyk and Paulina Gosławska came up with an app that helps people share food.

- Environmental issues are close to our hearts, many of us are trying to put the zero-waste principle into practice, probably everyone in our year uses water filter bottles in order not to produce excess plastic. The app was the next step for us towards, on the one hand, minimizing the amount of produced waste, and on the other – limiting food wasting – explains Agata Mostek and adds that they were guided by the idea of ​​creating a virtual table on which every user of the app could leave something or take something from it. – Social fridges work on a similar principle, but in our project we focused on mobility– says Agata. The new item turned out to be a hit. – Registration was late, nobody knew what was going to be in the class, but our lecturer, Wojciech Wodo PhD, carried out workshops instead of lectures and it was all very interesting. We learned SWOT analysis, S.M.A.R.T, costing, and developing business plans. This is very valuable knowledge that we will definitely use in the future - adds Agata Mostek.

- The competition will be organized at the end of each semester. This is the best way to show students that we take their several-month-long work seriously, but also to motivate them to self-educate further. We do not know where they will work after graduation, whether they will set up their own businesses or find employment in large companies, but knowledge about how to transfer academic education into the sphere of business, and therefore to real life, will be useful wherever they go to work - says Professor Mirosław Miller, who immediately adds that most students will also participate in innovation classes, where they will be able to develop their ideas further. - And we want to combine these classes with the Academic Business Incubator reactivated at the University, which is to be a part of this business ecosystem – emphasizes prof. Miller.

Within this entrepreneurial ecosystem, there is also a plan to cooperate with investment funds, which can offer, for example, consulting at a further stage of project development. – Most investment funds in Poland are so-called Bridge Alfa funds operating with public and private money. This is the money for the first stage of project development, up to 1 million PLN. I am sure that soon our students' projects will be able obtain these funds, which will help them to enter the implementation phase. Therefore, the projects will serve students not only to pass their course and possibly get an award in a university competition, which we have just concluded – says Professor Mirosław Miller.

The seminar summarizing the winter semester of Academic Entrepreneurship accompanied the Polish Information Day concerning the recent Bio-based Industries Joint Undertaking (BBI JU). The event aimed to present the theme of the BBI JU 2020 competition to the bio-industry. Bio-Based Industries Joint Undertaking is a joint venture of the European Union and the European industrial sector represented by the Biobased Industries Consortium (BIC) in a public-private partnership model. The partnership operates under the research and innovation funding program within Horizon 2020 and has 3.7 billion EUR allocated for investments in the field of industry based on materials of biological origin. Wrocław University of Environmental and Life Sciences is the only Polish university participating in this program.

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