Expo alike event where you can get to know the projects of the Demola Spring semester, talk with the project partners and meet the Demola facilitators and Alumni people.
Demola Budapest is a cross-university open innovation platform for students, start-ups and corporate stakeholders fostering innovation in Hungary. Our aim is to build up and preserve a multidisciplinary, entrepreneurial, youth community that delivers smart solutions to existing business problems and market challenges through our creative methodology. To this end we provide facilities and infrastructure for our incubated startups to grow, and we run each semester our Demola Program for university students. The objective of the Demola Program is to strengthen the ties between universities and enterprises by challenging student teams with real-cases coming from business partners. The program thus, offers a great opportunity for companies to outsource their business problems on talented student teams, and brings students an valuable, real-life experience. Demola Budapest is also a member of the world-wide Demola network. The concept derives from a collaboration of Finnish universities that gathered up to establish their first innovation project platform in 2008. It has brought so much success that 14 countries implement now their model around the globe. Budapest joined the network in 2012, and excels with its activity since.
Our partners (SMEs, MNCs, governmental institutions) approach us with their problems of different nature - IT, engineering, marketing, business, design or social etc. –, and, at the same time, entrusts us with recruiting creative students from different universities who would work out an innovative solution. Each beginning of a semester, we organize an open Info Day where we introduce the projects in the Demola framework. Students who would like to take the venture sign up for a project of their own choice, and for our 4-month Demola Program. During these 4 months, the youngsters work on the business solution with their partner’s help, meanwhile they sign a contract on the terms of compensation. At the end of the semester, the student teams officially present their ideas in a form of a pitch to an audience of interested parties. We enhance the development of this process with the Demola-cycle methodology that relies on lean management techniques. We assign to each team a facilitator who provides them administrative, networking and organizational help, and also fosters the team coherence. Besides that, we organize creative workshops (Demola Jams) around the topic of prototyping, brainstorming, idea validation and pitchin.