The winners of the Technova contest

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the class “Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital”, which was one of the mandatory subjects for the 4th year students last semester. You can read the post here. During the semester the students had to come up with an idea for an entrepreneurial venture and to prepare a business plan for it. The groups that came up with the best business plans got to pitch their project in front of a team from Technova.

Out of the ten finalists, the winning group consisted of Paul Mougin, Christian Pummerer and Dong Xu. While Paul and Dong are students in the fourth year of La Salle, Christian was visiting Barcelona as an exchange student last semester.

Paul is 24 years old from France and he loves music, entrepreneurship, experimenting new conceptual places, and to cook a good Sunday breakfast. He is also the founder of ParkSonar, a company that will launch it first app in a few weeks. Dong is Chinese, 25 years old, and he loves traveling with only a backpack, to ride motorcycles, and he is also a BBQ enthusiast. Christian is 26 years old and from Germany, where he is currently studying a masters degree. He enjoys dancing salsa, playing guitar and hanging out with his friends.

Paul and Dong in their new office

Together the boys came up with the idea of creating a marketplace of traveling experiences. They wanted to enable locals and travellers to get in touch with each other, to spend time together, and to make sure that both parties would benefit from this. They decided to create platform through which locals and travellers could interact; locals can share trips, tours or other types of activities, and travellers can contact the locals so they together can carry out the activity with the local acting as a guide.They named the platform “Adventurous”, and their pitch was “Adventurous is a marketplace of travel experiences, offering unique adventures for tourists organized by local people.”

During the early development stage of the project, the boys had many different ideas. The idea-generation phase was focused on finding a problem and discussing different potential solutions. They had several different problems that they wanted to solve. This was a difficult stage for the group because they actually started out with a different idea, but after conducting market research they decided to pivot, which happened several times. However, when the boys managed to correctly define the problem to solve, their project began to take shape.

For Paul, the team’s brainstorming sessions were his favourite part of the project. Dong told me that they typically met up on Sundays, where they would spend the whole day working on the project, only interrupted by a BBQ at lunchtime. This also made them a very solid team; they learned to work as one single unit, where each team member contributed with his best skills and experience.

In addition to the brainstorming sessions, Dong really enjoyed to see how each step of the project evolved, which to him was like a dream come true to see how a simple idea on a piece of paper could turn into a real product.

When I asked the boys why they themselves believe that they won the Technova competition, Dong said that both the idea and the executional part was very well developed while Paul added that their prototype was really advanced, which allowed the panel from Technova to really see and understand the whole platform. Also, they benefitted from being a team of energetic and diverse profiles that together complemented each other perfectly.

The home page of the prototype the boys created!

When the team got to know that they were one of the finalists for the competition, they were delighted. They were excited about the idea of competing with other interesting ideas and they knew that it was going to be tough. Dong told me that this was their motivational factor through the final stages, to make sure their outcome was as good as it could be.

The reward for the winner of the contest was free use of an open space office for four months, with entrepreneurial experts from Technova who would help the team with further development.

The boys are currently carrying out market research, before they will decide whether or not to actually create a final version of their prototype and officially set up the company. This is a difficult decision because they are about to graduate, which is an ideal time to set up a business, but as they also have different professional obligations and other projects they work on at the moment, they have decided to carry out extensive market research before making the final decision.

Anyway, whether they decide to startup the company or not, I’m sure we will hear more about these ambitious boys in the future.