European Innovation Academy
All of these amazing people you see above are my team, colleagues, and friends for life that I made thanks to the European Innovation Academy. We spent every moment of EIA together creating bonds and perfecting our idea in a super competitive program with over 500 participants and 100+ teams!
At the European Innovation Academy (EIA) in Lisbon, Portugal I worked with a team of students from Canada, and the U.S. Together we created the Green Hub application to help contractors. We validated our idea by speaking with customers, searched for product-market fit, and pitched to investors.
Quick note: I spared some details regarding the project in order to fully showcase this experience. For more information be sure to check my LinkedIn!
European Innovation Academy
EIA is a recognized leader in tech entrepreneurship education. They have developed programs through joint partnerships with professionals from the world’s top institutions; to include Stanford University, U.C. Berkeley, and Google.
They also provided some amazing seminars that were really instructive and I still remember them to this day.
EIA was one of the most enjoyable times I’ve had whilst learning. And also who doesn’t love a bit of Saxophone at lunchtime?
Our Idea
Our team identified an issue in the market of contractors, the persons that undertakes a contract to provide materials or labour to perform a service.
Our problem was that these contractors, sometimes, have struggles with:
- Communication with their customers
- Organization
- Accessibility to materials.
We came up with a solution that would be able to solve each of these issues with a simple mobile app. Allowing the contractor to easily communicate with their clients, where he could even schedule certain jobs in the app itself. Also, he would be able to buy the products needed for the job using an AI system connecting him to the stores.
The Program
- I want to briefly mention how we transformed our idea into a startup in just fifteen days
- The program was divided into 4 weeks as such:
Week 1
- Showcase your idea (if you have one)
- Join an idea (if you have none) <- this was me :p
- Meet your group and get to know each other
We took this opportunity to really get to know each other and planned a trip all the way down to Algarve where we spent a weekend at an apartment near the beach, enjoyed the sun and kayaked!
More photos on my Instagram!
Week 2
After this trip, it was all hands on deck. We headed back to Estoril where we spent most of our days working together and completing some tasks for our first week, namely:
- Validate our Customer
- Create a Customer Persona Design
- Validate our Market
This was not a time for adventures and trips, this time we put our heads down and straight to work we went! Researching, discussing ideas, and validating them with our mentors.
Week 3
In this week we were feeling pretty good about our idea, which was a great timing because it was time to show it off to everyone else!
Here, everyone had to make their own booth, where we could present our idea, and stroll around getting to know other people’s ideas as well.
It was pretty stressful, talking to around 500 people, repeating my obviously scripted dialogue to sell them our idea in order to get a chance to present it, at the very end, on this stage:
Spoilers: We didn’t get the chance to present it :( There were so many good ideas and only 5 could be picked. I’m pretty sure we were the 6th team though
Week 4
FINAL WEEK ALERT, FINAL WEEK ALERT 
Everyone was excited, every team worked so hard to get to this point.
I will be entirely honest when I say that every single idea was amazing and they all deserved to win.
Sadly our team did not. But that did not stop us from celebrating the finale of EIA with some good deserving balloons and one final dinner together.
The End
In the end, EIA was an experience that I will hold dearly for the rest of my life, as it taught many good things about entrepreneurship that will most likely help me when I venture that way, whilst also being a place where I made some amazing friends.
I want to thank Instituto Politécnico de Setúbal that chose me, and 4 other students to represent our college in this very prestigious program.
Here I am celebrating the event with all my friends I made along the way! 