The ‘start-up school’ opens at Gdańsk University of Technology | Gdańsk University of Technology

The purpose of creating the acceleration program is to support academic entrepreneurship and substantive preparation of teams of students or employees of Gdańsk University of Technology to establish their own spin-off / spin-out companies.

A comprehensive action plan and a space for workshops, consultations with mentors and project meetings of the teams participating in the training program are currently being prepared.

- The place where the activities focused around the ‘start-up school’ will be carried out is located on the ground floor of the Student's House No. 3, at Do Studzienki Street. These are rooms previously used by the Academic Enterprise Incubators foundation - explains Damian Kuźniewski, director of the Center for Knowledge and Technology Transfer, the university unit responsible for the implementation of the program.

According to the assumptions, two types of activities will be carried out under the program: permanent counseling for students along with cyclical workshops on business competences and the main acceleration program, in which three training cycles are planned per year. A single training cycle will take approximately 10 weeks.

- Recruitment will be conducted in a competition mode, and for each recruitment we plan to recruit up to 10 teams. A team interested in participating in the program should convincingly present their vision of the project on the basis of which they would like to later establish a company. One of the main evaluation criteria will be innovation and the possibility to implement the project, and ideas based on the results of research work carried out by the teams of authors will certainly be an advantage - explains Damian Kuźniewski.

Teams that successfully complete the acceleration program in a given recruitment will have a chance to receive a grant of 50 000 PLN, which can be used for pre-implementation works or necessary preparations for establishing a company. The first activities of the start-up school will begin this spring.