Semester Summary ✅

What a semester! We will soon be heading to the beach for some well-deserved vacations..!

Before you pack your swim trunks with your preferred sunblock, we would like to share with the main activities that “The Center for Technological Innovation and Entrepreneurship”, with the support of the Patrick & Lina Drahi Foundation (PLFA) achieved during the semester.

We thank all our partners that supported us to build such of great activities and from-the-heart-kudos to the participants and followers!

See you all back in September!

• Interacting with the student’s community
• We launched FORWARD! A free pre-acceleration program for students and alumni of Catolica-Lisbon who are at the beginning of their entrepreneurship journey. The program received the application of 24 teams and we selected 10. These 10 teams went through 5 sessions over 4 months (market definition, prototyping, etc…) with the participation of more than 20 mentors from the ecosystem. The demo day took place on May 15th and the winning team was “GLOOMA” that aims to commercialise a glove for the early detection of the breast cancer and won 1000€ in cash prize from the CTIE and additional mentoring support. The demo day with the 10 pitches here.
• This semester the CTIE challenged students to write articles to share on our social media channels and the following students accepted the challenge:
• Raphael Benjamin Bautz — Article on “Design and Innovation”
• Markus Duczek — Article on “Design for Innovation: Design Thinking and/or Design-driven Innovation”
• Max Jonas is the student that won the Best Thesis Award in June 2020. We encouraged Max to write an article on social media to summarise/share his research on Cloud Computing.
• Promoting students awards

For the fourth year in a row, the CTIE awarded 2 highly anticipated prizes to our students:

The 2021 Best Master Thesis Award

Between Apr. 2020 and Feb. 2021, a significant number of Master Theses were defended at the Católica Lisbon School of Business and Economics. The choice of the 2021 Best Master Theses Award has been made by academic fellows of the CTIE, namely Prof. Celine Abecassis-Moedas, Prof. Geraldo Cerqueiro and Prof. Raffaele Conti based on the following criteria:

- Focus on Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship

- Quality of the methodology

- Interest and applicability of results

The 2021 Best Master Thesis Award is a 500€ prize money and the winner is Louisa Aldag, who conducted her research on “The Influence of Culture on Women’s Entrepreneurial Intentions”. The thesis can be found here.

The 2021 Best Entrepreneurship Project Award

Católica-Lisbon provides a number of courses for students interested in entrepreneurship and starting their new venture. In the past, some of these projects that were started at the school, have caught the attention of the investors and have grown into full blown companies. Also, every year, CTIE wants to echo this reality and identify the most promising students’ ventures to give them visibility and support and a 2000€ prize money. Out of the 3 finalists, the winner is the project Junto, the first online platform to manage digital nomads.

• Connections with the entrepreneurship ecosystem
• Prof. Céline Abecassis-Moedas was interviewed by the organization “NICE — Mulheres Empreendedoras”.
• The CTIE launched a talk series called “Let’s talk women entrepreneurship” in partnership with Portuguese Women in Tech, Made of Lisboa and Startup Lisboa. The objective is to provide our female entrepreneurship community with practical and actionable content on the day to day job!
• The importance of Negotiation skills for female entrepreneurs with the following guests:
• Cristina Raposo (Onalytics)
• Joana Antunes (OutSystems)
• Manuela Doutel-Haghighi (Leidos)

A snap preview of the session here (In Portuguese)

• Lessons learned from Female entrepreneur looking for investment with the following guests:
• Carolina Amorim (Emotai)
• Lurdes Gramaxo (Bynd)
• Marcia Pereira (Bandora Systems)
• Press articles from the CTIE Investors in Residence
• A Portuguese article from Silvia Almeida regarding self confidence and rehearsing your investment pitch before presenting (here)
• How to prepare your startup for the first investment round (in Portuguese) by Pedro Cerdeira.
• The “Talk About” series podcast aims to provide curated content from pundits and experts in their fields to support our community in their journey. During this semester we added 2 more podcasts as follows:
• Innovation and Career with Fiona Disegni, where we discuss about the difference of being an employee or founder, or how do they go together as well as innovation and the Lisbon Startup scene.
• Entrepreneurship, Career and Family with Marta Palmeiro the winner of the 2020 Women Entrepreneurship Award and talks about her career, entrepreneurship versus corporate, and conciliating it all with the family!

5. Celebrating diversity and entrepreneurship

For the 3rd year in a row, the CTIE organized the 2021 edition of the Women Entrepreneurship Award. We received 58 eligible applications! Because of the quality of the finalists, this is there are 2 winners of the Women Entrepreneurship Award! The winners ex-aequo of this year’s edition are Joana Paiva and Sonia Ferreira Congratulations to both for their work on Ilof and Besthealth4U which led them to be selected by the jury!

Congratulations to the other finalist Louise Lindblad from Valispace for their brilliant presentations and thanks to all the entrepreneurs who accepted the challenge and applied for the award, elevating even more the role of women in the business world.