Germination Program

About the program

The Germination program starts in November 2022 and ends in March 2023.

The program will consist of multiple phases, during which you will learn how to gather ideas, select the best one out of them, and put it into practice.

 

It consists of a series of at least 9 workshops (held on Saturdays, in-person and online by the program’s founders  and their guests).

In between the workshops: there is team homework, including preparing presentations for the next session  and of course, advancing their on-going business project together with their teammates. Every participant will also have access to video lectures of the topics discussed in the next workshop, created by our international founding team of experts. Mentorship and feedback sessions with international experts will take place.

The workshops’ names are inspired from the agricultural process, reflecting the phases an entrepreneur goes through before “blooming” fully.

The schedule is as follows:

1. Kickoff Workshop
2. Plow Workshop
3. From Spark to Impact Workshop
4. Seed Workshop
5. Sprout Workshop
6. Bud Workshop
7. Flower Workshop
8. Fruit Workshop
9. Harvest Workshop

The program is structured along the integration of Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Agile principles, and taught by the same professors who have founded and grown their programs in Israel, so you can be assured that you are developing yourself according to internationally recognized standards.

You and your partners during this course, will compete against other teams, to create the best business project in the program, and present it during a plenary presentation in front of your peers and world-renowned professors in entrepreneurship from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, as well as University Politehnica of Bucharest.

Who can apply?

Are you an aspiring entrepreneur? Someone who would like to start a business, but not sure where to start? Or perhaps someone who has an idea, but not sure how to put it into practice?

So, if you are open-minded, have a healthy dose of work ethic, and look forward to creating the new unicorn of Romania, then we invite you to apply to our program!

BIOdyssey invites you to apply to our intensive entrepreneurship program, where you will team up with other like-minded individuals, who are ambitious, creative and have a can-do attitude towards business!

Learning Outcomes

 Introduction

Scientific and technological innovation processes can result from in-depth research and breakthroughs resulting from processes within the laboratory. In addition, innovation processes are also created from an in-depth analysis and a clear understanding of global challenges and needs that come from the fields, i.e. industry, clients and end-users. Geopolitical processes, demographics, extreme climate change, water shortages, food and raw materials, natural disasters and conflicts frequently create new trends that are unknown to humanity in scope and nature. These trends, by their very nature, require creative thinking, and require innovation and ingenuity.

 In this program, educating for creative and innovative thinking is done by initiating a group innovation process that meets a global challenge with emphasis on human health. Each year several significant challenges will be identified, and in a methodological process, each group will develop a proven concept (POC), using a prototype for the defined challenge. During this process, students will be exposed to several sources of knowledge in the field of the specific challenge they confront, they will also experience workshops on leadership and guidance of work teams, experience a full process of startup development, learn and practice best practices and skills in innovation leadership and multidisciplinary team leadership, perform strategic analysis, and will deal with user research, ethics, brainstorming and ideation, visual illustration, experience design, prototyping, presenting short presentations (pitching) and building a preliminary business model.

Learning outcomes:

1. Expert lectures and workshops in the field of the global challenge selected for that year.
2. Understanding the principles of ‘creative innovation’ processes and implementing them in the process of leading a solution to a complex global challenge, in a multidisciplinary team.
3. Understanding basic concepts in the field of innovation, strategy, user research, mapping of unmet needs and stakeholders, technological and scientific benchmark, IP. Apply these concepts in a real process of proposing a proven concept.
4. Learning by experience in finding creative solutions, group creative processes.
5. Experiencing working in multidisciplinary teams, leading teams in innovation processes and leadership in conditions of uncertainty of innovation.