From an idea to a growing business

From your mind to the marketplace: This Monday, 14 October, the participants of the first Twin Entrepreneurs workshop, organised by the Vienna Business Agency, took a step in this direction at technology center aspern IQ. inventures.eu was there for the highlights.

This was Workshop I

Monday’s workshop, themed “getting your business from inception to growth” was held by Stefan Perkmann Berger, with a focus on developing a feasible business model all the way from an idea. Attending were entrepreneurs from a number of different backgrounds from search engine development to the gamification of change management, to building an electric scooter for inner-city transportation.

After a short introduction game, where participants competed against each other in two groups in a miniature engineering challenge, Perkmann Berger delved into the workshop, and pointed participants towards iterative learning, questioning their own assumptions and adapting their startup to the market. The morning of theory was lightened up by examples of success and failure of well-known companies such as Paypal, Flickr, and Hotmail.

The afternoon was considerably more hands-on, with a strong focus on developing a business model canvas – the workshop concluded with participants pairing and using the What A Venture tool to create business model canvases for their respective partners, presenting them, and receiving feedback from the group.

What’s next?

Already this coming Monday, 21 October, the second Twin Entrepreneurs workshop will take place at technology center aspern IQ. It will be held by Thomas Funke and the focus will be on customer development and the product-market fit.

For those of you who like to plan ahead, it will be followed by the third workshop “Growing into a new market” on 28 October at The Spot in Bratislava. The speaker there will be Vienna-based business angel Selma Prodanovic, who will talk about marketing, customer segmentation and how to select the ideal market for future growth.

This week the participants sounded excited to come back for the next round of the series – will you be there? Make sure to secure your spot!

Twin Entrepreneurs is a cross-border initiative aimed at providing practical assistance to startups from the area of Vienna and Bratislava that want to make the second step – sustain their business and expand abroad. The series is organised by the Vienna Business Agency, the European National Agency for Development of Small and Medium Enterprises and the Young Entrepreneurs Association of Slovakia.