Priorities:Boğaziçi University Student Priorities

STRATEGY #1: ENCOURAGING STUDENTS TO TELL THEIR IDEA WITHOUT FEAR

Project: Bright Pitching Day

Person in Charge: Berkay Kani

Project Details

One of the biggest problems of the students in our school is to hesitate to express their ideas. This is because people despise them or steal their ideas. As people with the ​​entrepreneurship mindset, we believe that sharing will always strengthen ideas.

I designed the Pitching Day event for this. There will be 5 teams, audince and 3 successful juries. We will share an application form for selection of teams using our communication channels. For the event, 3 successful startup co-founders will be contacted and asked to be a jury. The event will be advertised for participants from our communication channels. The event will be in the center's office on our main campus. There will be a 30-minute networking session before the event starts. Here, the owners, the participants and the juries will have the chance to meet. Idea owners will write the type of people they need on a whiteboard. There will be a 5 minute presentation and 5 minute question and answer session in front of the juries. After the presentations are over, participants will be able to talk to them to join their teams.

We will provide office and entrepreneurship training to the 2 winning teams.

STRATEGY #2: CREATING FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES FOR SELECTED STARTUPS

Project: Bright Demo Day

Person in Charge: Berkay Kani

Project Details

Entrepreneurs often face financial problems while expanding their startups. In some times, things cannot be done and solved without money.

Teams selected to work in our incubation center are also experiencing this problem. So I designed the Bright Demo Day event to solve the investment problem of these startups. At this event, there will be teams who selected in Pitching Day and who completed entrepreneurship training in our incubation center. Using the network of Entrepreneurship Center, 3 seed investors will be contacted and offered to be a jury in the event. Then 5 teams will be selected to make presentations in front of the investors. The teams will tell the investors their products, ask for a certain amount of investment and try to convince the investors to make this investment. In fact, the event is similar to the Shark Tank event. Teams that can convince investors will receive investment and will have the opportunity to grow their startups further.

STRATEGY #3: TRAINING MORE ENTREPRENEURS

Project: Bright Experience

Person in Charge: Fatih Gözükara

Project Details

There is too much event on entrepreneurship but not enough entrepreneurs. In order to train more entrepreneurs, we need to work more to the point than general events. For this, we have designed an experience-oriented, beginning-to-end process that will have a good story for all of us at the end of the day.

BRIGHT EXPERIENCE

Bright Talks (Hello World)

First of all, there will be a series of speeches where entrepreneurs can find answers to our questions such as what is entrepreneurship, what is not, what is the place of what we call the entrepreneurship ecosystem, how an entrepreneur's life progresses, what challenges and opportunities await those who want to become entrepreneurs. An entrepreneur and an investor will be invited to these events in order to appeal to the entrepreneurs who already have an enterprise, if possible, the enterprises will be from the enterprises that have invested, and the investor will be the investors of this enterprise.

Bright Learns (We Learn to Walk)

Trainings on problem solving methods and tools such as Design Thinking, which are used in the process of producing innovative solutions to problems, will be organized. Additionaly, these trainings include project management, marketing, brand building and so on. Processes will be supported by additional trainings on which we can improve ourselves.

Bright Works (Walking, Sometimes Running)

Until now, we have heard and learned many things about entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity. We will do some work to practice what we have learned. First of all, we will organize case studies with startups in the incubation center. (We can invite external startup.) We will try to find solutions to their problems. In this way, we will not only support the startups of our school and we will be familiar with them, but also will be working on concrete works and practicing and increasing our knowledge on this subject.

In the second stage, companies will be asked for projects which are open to innovation. We will be working on these projects as a team work in the form of long-term projects or pop-up workshops. Here we will both have seen real business and will learn a lot from their experience as we will work with companies.

Bright Wins (We're Dancing or Something Like That)

As it will work with companies in this process, various opportunities such as global awards, internship opportunities in innovation-oriented units in the companies, and tasks that can be taken in startups can be created according to the scope of the projects. We will be working on that part. We may be open to surprises.

Better yet, maybe one of us will start their own startups in the process.

STRATEGY #4: SOLVING PROBLEMS THAT DISCOURAGES PEOPLE TO BE ENTERPRENEUR

Project: Design Thinking Workshop

Person in Charge: Elanur Gayıp

Project Details

There are many factors preventing the development of initiatives at Boğaziçi University.Unnecessary restraint of many places that enable students to work, high student population, high student quota,the lack of financial means of the school, the lack of environment that allows students to be creative.

 As Bright team, we tried to understand the Campus problems at Boğaziçi University by using the Design Thinking method with the support of Turkcell Arıkovanı and our team of 10 people and we started this way with our the Design the Campus project. 

Our aim was to create a small butterfly effect and raise awareness on the one hand.  The students also had the opportunity to realize their ideas.  As a result of the studies, ideas about the development of the campus were formed by the students.  At the end of the first session, they started to think about the needs of the students and their solutions with insight surveys.  Many prototypes have emerged with the support of sustainability and social impact approach to Turkcell Arıkovanı's ideas.  Our students' self-confidence was more fulfilled and they began to use this methodology used by world-renowned companies.

 

Design thinking, which stands out with its increasing popularity, prepares the ground for the emergence of creative ideas as a methodological approach based on human beings, which enables them to be further developed through prototyping workshops.  All these efforts and the systematic of innovative thinking create an impact that shakes people's stereotyped thinking patterns.  It is not easy to shake and change the thought patterns that have settled over the years and solidified with experience.  Design-oriented thinking avoids the possibility of preventing these patterns from finding new ways and creating new solutions.  Thinking outside of the patterns for innovative problem solving can be achieved.

Related Links

Project Video: Watch Here

University Innovation Fellow Candidate: Berkay Kani