Events, Meetings and Visits to Leading Companies
Portuguese Entrepreneurs Visit CMU Campus in Pittsburgh and Silicon Valley
The partnership between Portuguese academia, research labs and companies, with CMU has been evolving, and it is now moving towards entrepreneurship and innovation. One of the initiatives is inRes, a very early stage acceleration program for entrepreneurs from Portugal in the area of ICT, which this year included a six-week period in Pittsburgh, followed by a week in Silicon Valley.
A group of eight entrepreneurs, from the projects Adapttech, Playsktech, Sceelix, and Scraim, while in Pittsburgh, have participated in multiple activities including LaunchCMU (having their own booths); the 1st Maker Fair in Pittsburgh (Playsktech team has had its own booth); led a workshop on Project Olympus on an innovative software management platform (Scraim team); led two workshops at the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) and at the Human Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) about a pioneering platform to create scenarios in 3D (Sceelix team); talked with hospital administrators, to physiatrists in Pittsburgh, but also in Maryland (Adapttech team); and attended the Tech 50 Award event. In global, each team had more than 50 meetings. Their challenging journey started on September 21, 2015 in Pittsburgh, PA at the main campus of CMU
As this year’s program included a week at Silicon Valley, the CMU Portugal Program extended the invitation for the inRes 2014 teams to participate as well. The challenged proposed was accepted by three teams: Addvolt, Followprice, Xhockware. Displr team had already confirmed its presence at the Web Summit 2015. During their visit to Pittsburgh, last year, the teams magnified their network and made customer development research, that allowed them to introduce changes on the way they looked to their project, and even on the way of being entrepreneurs. The agenda of the 13 entrepreneurs from Portugal that had the opportunity to be immersed during a week at the Silicon Valley innovation ecosystem, exposed the teams to a highly dense environment of world-leading research groups, and market and industry specialists, in a variety of high-tech areas.
The agenda included visits to the CMU-SV campus, to Facebook, to Pug and Play, to Ford Motor, to Vibrado, to Uber, among many others. This opportunity is provided in the scope of the inRes initiative, carried our in the auspices of CMU Portugal Program, which is funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology.
December 2015
