Q&A: European Innovation Academy

The European Innovation Academy (EIA), now in its fourth year, is an “extreme accelerator” which aims to attract students from IT and business fields from universities around the world and get them to build a startup from the ground up within three weeks. This year, the event is taking place at the University of Nice in the south of France, and looks to be the biggest and most internationally reaching programme yet.

To learn more about the July event, Global University Venturing spoke to Anni Sinijärv (pictured), chief executive at EIA.

What is the European Innovation Academy trying to achieve?

Our plan for this summer is to build up 100 startups within 15 days. Our idea for that is that we want to establish more ICT startups, and in order to achieve that, we’re gathering the most talented students from the most prestigious universities around the world. The overall goal is to generate startups, but also to really show the students to show how to build the startups to begin with. We’ll be showing them how to start from scratch up to the focus on customers and how to attract venture capitalists.

The programme itself is very much Silicon Valley-minded. We’re going to have over 50 mentors and professors on hand, two thirds of which are from Silicon Valley and have been chosen as some of the best in their fields. Our methodology is strongly based on mentorship, so all teams will have their own mentor to support them over the three weeks who will be working with them every day.

The programme is split over three weeks, what’s the agenda for each week?

The first week is about the idea. Students will already have some ideas before coming to the academy, and we will be opening up an online platform two months prior to the event where they can either add an idea or join an existing business plan. For example, you are an IT student with a brilliant idea, but have no experience with business. You spot another student with several years of experience, and you think “okay, I need that guy on my team”, so you ask him (or her) to join your team.

The plan is that we get teams with a mix of different universities in each team, with a focus on mixing nationalities. For example, around a third of our students will be from the US, and we are building the teams so students from there won’t be able to have all-US teams.

So at the beginning at the first week, we will be focusing on team building and then the validation of their ideas. We’ll also be focusing on future trends in technology, which gives them insight into what technologies they will need in order to build their startup.

The second week is about business models and prototyping. As it is a particularly intense incubator, teams will only get the first week to work on the idea, and the second week will be all about building that startup. So IT students will be working on the prototyping, and business students working on the model. This will also be supported by mentoring and lectures to build knowledge in both areas.

The beginning of the third week will start with a crucial moment where the teams have to have their product online. This is one of the ways that our methodology is different from our peers as there has to be some sort of tangible result – and we’re collaborating with Google in order to have their applications ready to go in time.

What’s the end goal of the startups generated by the Academy’s teams?

There are different options. We encourage all our students to take their ideas on to other accelerators, but our main goal is to simply generate the startups and let the teams develop them further afterwards. Our perfect success story would be one of our startups getting involved in a massive deal, such as the $19bn sale of messaging app WhatsApp to Facebook.

Of course, the work done at the Academy is only the beginning of the long journey of the startup’s life.

Universities interested in participating can still join this year’s event. More details can be found at http://inacademy.eu/.