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It's real, you can do it! & Competitiveness in the North Region of Portugal

It's real, you can do it!

MIETE 2nd Cycle has a clear value proposition to it's students: An Integrated trainning in the innovation process and in technology, promoting the creation of new technology-based business. Moreover, we take our students go through a rigorous hands-on training that covers the entire venture creation process.

Leaving the course with your own business is real! Two businesses have already been launched with the business plan prepared during MIETE:
February 2007: Tomorrow Options Microelectronics S.A. (no website)
March 2006: IDEAVITY , 1st entreprise is launched by former MIETE students. You can actually register and use their Social Networking Platform for teenagers: www.mingle.pt

We hope to make an announcement of MIETE 2nd Cycle soon. We are still waiting for its approval by DGES. Please let us know if you have any questions!

SKYPE: miete.up

You can download the MIETE 2nd Cycle brochure here: English, Português

Competitiveness in the North Region of Portugal, Porto, 15 March
We have today a contribution from Mr. Ricardo Jorge da Fonseca Luz, with a Degree in Economics from Porto University (1991) and a MSc in Design for Sustainability, Cranfield University, UK (2005). He has large and diverse experiences as a Strategy and Management Consultant and Entrepreneur. He is founder and partner of GESTLUZ - Consultores de Gestão, Lda., of Designarte – Design e Comunicação, Lda., and of a spin-off in the area of Computer Dynamics Fluids (FluidInova – Engenharia de Fluidos, S.A.). He is also President of a Business Angels Network - Invicta Angels (www.invictaangels.pt) and Vice-President of Alumni Association of Faculty of Economics of Porto University (www.fep.up.pt/aaafep).

MIETE-BLOG: Dr. Ricardo Luz, thank you so much for your availability to talk with us. Could you give us a brief presentation of Invicta Angels?
Ricardo Luz: The Invicta Angels – Porto Business Angels Association is a group of persons available to invest not only money but also their experience and their business skills, time and contact networks in Entrepreneurial Projects in Porto’s Region. Business Angels are private investors, also called informal investors, who invest in small and medium sized businesses with a high potential of growth. To Invicta Angels the relationship with the most representative Entities of Porto’s Region is fundamental, for the development of her activity, namely those who promote a better linkage between I&DT Centres, incubators and the market, through the associates contacts networks. Periodically, the Invicta Angels promotes a “Dinner – Projects Presentation”, where entrepreneurs have 5 minutes to present their ideas/projects, selected previously by the associates/investors.

Further information
The Federação Nacional de Associações de Business Angels promotes its National Week of Business Angels from the 12th to the 16th of March in various places in Portugal! A great opportunity for Entrepreneurs to meet Investors directly. More information can be found at www.fnaba.org.
Included in this initiative, the Invicta Angels promotes, on the 15th of March (Thursday) from 15h30m to 19h30, the event “Competitiveness in North Region: Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Financing”, in the Salão Nobre of University of Porto.
The "National Week of Business Angels" precedes the EBAN - European Business Angel Network Congress that will take place on April 16 and 17 in Estoril Congress Center, on the outskirts of Lisbon, and will receive institutional sponsorship from IAPMEI and the City Hall of Cascais.

Competitividade da Região Norte: Inovação, Empreendedorismo e Financiamento
15 de Março | Salão Nobre da Reitoria

One Step Ahead! Towards the Future...

Courses that take their participants through the entire venture creation process are rare in Europe and MIETE is one of the very few exceptions to the rule.

This evaluation results from a recent survey (prepared in January 2007 for DGES) and clearly positions MIETE as an innovative course in the European space. MIETE takes its participants through the entire venture creation process, by combining real training in the innovation process and technology commercialization with the interaction of its students with researchers from different fields at the University of Porto (UP).

This very practical “hands-on” approach to training with real commercialization problems enables students to better grasp the actual innovation process and to go through the real experience of technology commercialisation. The real objective is to assemble a sound and solid business plan ready to be analyzed by investors by the end of the course.

This distinctive feature was further reinforced in the proposal of the MIETE 2nd Cycle (Bolonha). You can download the course brochure here:
- English
- Português

Further reasons why you should join us, have fun, and build your own business:

• MIETE receives students from a broad educational background and provides each of them with the flexibility to adjust the technical training to their needs. Students are allowed to select optional technical courses up to 24 ETCS from all 2nd Cycles available at the University of Porto. This allows students from very different backgrounds to mingle in MIETE’s multidisciplinary commercialisation teams.

We care about your Competitive Advantage!
Please let us know if you feel like you need further clarification.
You can reach us at: miete@fe.up.pt / +351 93 293 45 29

MIETE Cultural Project

With our best wishes for this Holiday Season and all the best for the New Year, we are now back with our regular Postings at MIETE-BLOG with the "MIETE Cultural Project".


MIETE Cultural Project

Training and New Business Construction
MIETE promotes and innovative combination of training in Technology, Creativity and Management, promoting, whenever appropriate, the valorisation of technologies through the construction of commercialisation strategies and their implementation through licensing or through the creation of new businesses.
In this context, where innovation is approached as a conscious and consistent effort for identifying new opportunities, MIETE aims at bridging the gap between the technology discovery – conducted at Faculties, Research Institutes, Research Units and Enterprises – and the commercialisation of innovative technology-based products and services, both through the constructions of new businesses or through the transfer of technology to existing companies.

MIETE as Pivot in the Technology Transfer Process
The model with which MIETE started in Sep/04 relied heavily on the interaction of MIETE teams and R&D groups at the University of Porto. In Sep/06 the new MIETE students faced an increment in training in the usage of creative processes and techniques to support the early ideation phases. In parallel, the course started the establishment of bridges to the enterprises.
This connection is crucial for the role that MIETE aims at playing in the Portuguese society. The picture illustrates the current MIETE operations model where MIETE multidisciplinary teams play an interface role in Training, Technology Transfer, R&D and established enterprises.
By promoting this close relationship with R&D groups and Enterprises, MIETE wishes to explicitly position itself as a Pivot in the innovation process, technology transfer and new venture creation.

João José Pinto Ferreira, Director do MIETE

Think big! Be open minded! Get excited with your own business!

Catarina Monteiro is an Environment Engineer graduated at the School of Biotechnology of Porto (UCP). Catarina Joined MIETE in September 2004.

MIETE-BLOG: It’s late July and we all dream about holidays, seaside and a relaxing environment. Catarina thank you so much for you time and for this brief interview. Please let us know a little bit about your background, about what lead you to Environment Engineering and finally to Innovation and Entrepreneurship?
CM: I was always a fan of the National Geographic; I think it was the greatest influence in the choice of my course. I was particularity interested in the sustainable development and how it could change our way to see the world so I decided to become an environment engineer. After I graduated I was full of ideas and wanted to start a business in this area. I realized that having ideas was not enough so I decided to enter in the MIETE, to learn how to transform ideas into successful businesses. I have to admit that MIETE changed the course of my professional life. Now I work in innovation and technology transfer and I plan to start my own business in a totally different area, this year.

MIETE-BLOG: Along the 1st edition of MIETE you and your team took one technology from a graduation project at FEUP and turned it into a product to world market. It was a long way to the final business plan that keeps being updated. Could you describe briefly your feelings along the way, the emotional up’s and down’s along the process of bringing a technology to the world market (it’s not there yet, we know, but it’s on its way!!!)
CM: It was definitively a process with ups and downs! In the beginning you are constantly going back and forth, screening the different potential products and markets that your technology can reach. There is always some information missing or, after weeks of work, you need to change everything because you discover that there is a better market. On the other hand you are working with people that you just met and even when the team is fully commited and the business plan is almost done there is always new information and changes that have to be done. But in the end it is really exciting to see the plan of your own business, with your ideas and the strategies that you believe is going to be a success.

MIETE-BLOG: Any lessons learned? Would you like to share some of your thoughts with the new MIETE student starting in September?
CM: I think that there were several lessons given by MIETE that can be applied to all the people to all the jobs, apart from the development of several important competences such as team work, leadership, work priorities and organization, to think big (the world is your market), to be open minded (a good opportunity does not have to be in your graduate area), and if one does not have potential, there are others that do.

MIETE-BLOG: Would you go through it all over again?
CM: Definitely, even if there was not a business in the end, I learned important things that can be used in all professional activities.

MIETE-BLOG: The negotiation of the technology Intellectual Property Rights is now going through its last steps. You and your MIETE colleague are about to start you’re new Venture in September. What does it feel like?
CM: This has a huge step. In the beginning of this process the team discussed the intentions and ways of participating in this business at the time we were still finishing the thesis so the negotiations were in a more slow rhythm. Now entering in the last steps of the negotiations’ the stress is rising, especially because Portuguese Universities are not used to technology transfer to start ups so the process is slow and full of bureaucracies. There is now an increasing responsibility and enthusiasm of starting a business that you planned throught the last two years.

We care about your competitive advantage!

It is our vision to achieve world-class excelence in the construction of technology-based ventures.

To this end we started the construction of the MIETE knowledge base (MIETE.KB) in order to provide our current and old students with a clear competitive advantage in the construction of technology-based businesses.

As we all know, each business is a new business and a competitive advantage can be gained by sharing past errors, bad and successful experiences and approaches, as well as solutions to the most common issues. Having this in mind, we started a collaborative effort to gather knowledge regarding know-how and best practices, validated by the daily experience acquired in the construction of product and business value propositions.

MIETE.KB currently covers:
- Methodological issues and best practices
- Information sources (secondary information sources)
- MIETE in videostream (MIETE TEC Sequence seminars are recorded during the classes and published in Quicktime Hinted Streaming or MPEG4)
- MIETE student's contacts

MIETE Knowledge Base is built on the Mediawiki platform. Access to the MIETE.KB is granted to every MIETE student and old-student. After authentication, the MIETE community is granted access to the collaborative edition of all its contents.

We started in October 2005 and the MIETE.KB is growing slowly as students realize the clear advantages of its usage.

What our students say...
Is it usefull? “Yes, it can be very usefull”; “It is a superb working tool allowing experiences of successes and failures to be shared”
Have you used it before? “Yes, I was looking for Patent information”
Did you manage to make any contributions so far? “Not yet, still more handy to use email. Maybe the interface can be improved”; “No, lack of time”; "Yes, one contribution made and a few more under preparation"

Lessons learned and future actions
MIETE.KB benefits are recognised by a broad majority of students. However, its usage is still not straight-forward for everybody, namely the editing. Next year new students will be given training on how to use this infrastructure so that the MIETE.KB can also be used as FAQ forum from the 1st day. This should ensure that the right momentum is gained on the knowledge gathering. We will further keep our effort to ensure that all contributions are made in English.

João José Pinto Ferreira, Director of MIETE

Mafalda, Interior Designer, joined IDEAVITY as project leader in January 2006

Mafalda Moreira is an Interior Designer graduated at the High School of Arts and Design of Matosinhos (ESAD) where she developed some critical texts for the school publication “ESAD Questioning”.
At her senior year Mafalda exposed a prototyped project at FUTURE AMBIENTS exhibition at EXPONOR. Also result of a senior year project, Mafalda was invited by ESAD to participate in a collective exhibition to be at BIENAL de CERVEIRA and afterwards at Municipal Gallery at the Matosinhos City Hall.
Her projects were presented at several design magazines such has Experimenta (Spanish Design Magazine) and Espaço & Design (Portuguese Design magazine).
Until January 2006 she has been working with ESAD in the Communications and Projects Office, where she worked on the organization of events and publications, partnerships with cultural and governmental institutions and with foreign institutions including the co-coordination of European projects sponsored by the European Union.
Mafalda joined MIETE 1st edition in September 2004 and IDEAVITY in January 2006.

MIETE-BLOG: After the interview with the Mingle team talking with you was a must! Mafalda, please you tell us a little bit about your background? What lead you to design and to interior design and, finally, to Innovation and Entrepreneurship?
MM: First of all I’ve always had a wide range of interests. And doing a Design degree was the way to keep in touch with all disciplines that surround Design and explore all factors that contribute to make Design. I’ve started by Communication Design and afterwards changed to Interior Design because I felt the need to work the space and explore its interrelation with users. Communication Design is nevertheless always present in my projects because Design is also To Communicate. To make project come alive has everything to do with Entrepreneurship, so I decided to explore the Innovation and Entrepreneurship field. This revealed to me as an area in which creation and finding opportunities to explore are the key concepts.
The good thing about this Master Course was that I could adapt the optional courses to my profile and chose those that best fit my interests, namely courses from MSc in Multimedia Technology.

MIETE-BLOG: You joined IDEAVITY as Project Leader. Along the whole course your experience has been very interesting. You started by working on a fuel cell business concept, then moved to the Ortophoto Project with our colleague Sérgio Reis Cunha (see video of PSA project at MIETE-CAST - pt). For this project you and your MIETE colleagues developed a business plan that will most likely be used to launch the actual business. We also know that you have been working with the Mingle Team for more than a year. Can you tell us a little bit about how this collaboration started and your motivations to join IDEAVITY?
MM: This collaboration started on an optional course from the MSc in Multimedia Technology called “Human-Computer Interaction”. My colleagues were developing a business concept for teens communication via WEB and mobile devices and for that course we formed a group and developed a product concentrating on usability issues.
Has a team we developed a very good relation and most of all, we had lots of fun doing a project that became very interesting for the MINGLE concept.
During the first year of the master I’ve kept in touch with my colleague’s refinement of their business concept, giving some inputs in the design area: the project name and some possible services to create. From that collaboration emerged the invitation to join the team at IDEAVITY as project leader in January 2006. I’ve accepted the invitation and left my former job because I believe in the MINGLE concept and want to bring it to the teanagers all over the world.

Further reading: MIETE-BLOG Post dated from January 25, 2006: "The Teenager Digital Life Interface" (here)