Shar­ing pho­tos “live” with your friends, find­ing all you want to know about a City in a sin­gle “app”, etc. These are just two of the projects that emerged dur­ing the Start-Up Week­end, Com­pieg­ne –that took place May 15–17, 2015 at the UTC Daniel Thomas Inno­va­tion Centre 

The con­cept of a Start-up Week­end ini­tial­ly came from the USA and was orga­nized by the UTC stu­dents for the first time last year. The objec­tive for the week­end is to set up a start-up in just 54h by col­lab­o­ra­tive team work. “We want to devel­op the start-up spir­it in the Picardie Region, and enable every­one to exchange ideas and iden­ti­fy pos­si­ble asso­ciates”, explains Cédric Car­vahlo, a mem­ber of the orga­niz­ing team.

The UTC Inno­va­tion Cen­tre seemed an ide­al venue for this sort of event, thanks notably to its “cre­ativ­i­ty rooms”, Ninon Duri­vault, co-orga­niz­er con­firms: “The UTC Inno­va­tion Cen­tre is indeed the ide­al place to host an event like this. The project plat­form on which the par­tic­i­pants work has its tables and mobile walls so that the can orga­nize the work space as they wish. More­over, the num­ber of sur­faces avail­able allow the par­tic­i­pants to w<rite on the walls, to stick up Post-its® and express all their poten­tial creativity”.

This sec­ond edi­tion saw 60 par­tic­i­pants came to Com­pieg­ne, one third with no con­nec­tions with UTC. “The truth is, we decid­ed to par­tic­i­pate in the Start-up Week­end to final­ize a project among a bunch of friends” says Jérôme Durand, UTC stu­dent, for whom this was his first participation. These par­tic­i­pants (stu­dents, lec­tur­ers, research staff, “cre­atives”, com­pa­ny mangers …) may or may not have an idea in mind when they arrive, as was the case of Fab­rice Faradèche, man­ag­er of the Blan­chisserie Cen­trale [a chain of pro­fes­sion­al clean­ers] in the city of Sois­sons and Pres­i­dent of the Picardie Entre­pre­neurs’ Net­work, who want­ed to find a way to ‘mark’, i.e., fol­low clothes form res­i­dents in retire­ment homes. In every case, “the par­tic­i­pants had just 60 sec­onds to present their idea(s) and trig­ger an inter­est in the audi­ence so as to be able to put a team togeth­er”, explains Nico­las Bor­ri, co-organiser. 

Out of 23 ideas pre­sent­ed in this man­ner, 12 were pre-select­ed for the next step. What is spe­cif­ic to this kind of event is that there is a rich mix of pro­files in the teams. “Giv­en that the par­tic­i­pants come from dif­fer­ent UTC spe­cial­ties (GSU-urban engi­neer­ing, GI-Com­put­er sci­ences, GM-Mechan­i­cal engi­neer­ing, Master’s in Design course and IUT stu­dents in com­put­er sci­ences and soft­ware engi­neer­ing), the trans­verse aspects of the projects was seen as high­ly attrac­tive”, says Jérôme Durand.  The select­ed par­tic­i­pants then have exact­ly 54 h to spec­i­fy their ini­tial idea bet­ter, to pro­duce and present a busi­ness plan and then make a pro­to­type at the UTC Fab’Lab … all of which pro­vides for an intense and very reward­ing expe­ri­ence, as wit­ness­es Jihane LFRIDI, a mem­ber of the PicatchUS team: “First­ly, we want­ed to cre­ate a con­ducive orga­ni­za­tion spir­it, that would enable us to move for­ward effi­cient­ly. We pro­gressed in team work dis­cus­sions on the var­i­ous points and then we assigned tasks to each team mem­ber. By ana­lyz­ing the mar­ket, we were also able to present a busi­ness plan. It was great expe­ri­ence to test our lim­its in terms of work capac­i­ty and project con­cen­tra­tion”, adds Jerome who con­cludes: “We were able, above all oth­er con­sid­er­a­tions, to dis­cov­er new project man­age­ment tools spe­cif­ic to the world of start(ups and these we learned from the Start-up Week­end orga­niz­ers and var­i­ous coach­es on hand dur­ing the event.”

When the 54h expired, the teams pre­sent­ed their work before the Jury – the lat­ter com­pris­ing pro­fes­sion­als of the fields stud­ied and oth­er staff mem­bers of UTC, to try to con­vince them that their projects were indeed viable. In the final selec­tion, three start-ups received awards after this year’s edition:

• Cit­i­ZEN: an “app” desired to bring togeth­er a mass of infor­ma­tion rel­a­tive to a city: includ­ing trans­port, road works, landmarks .. 

• Picatch’Us: this «app » allows you to cre­ate a pho­to-album that can be shared to sim­ply exchang­ing pho­tos on spe­cial occa­sions, events, nights-out. 

• Web Fam­i­ly: a sys­tem to iden­ti­fy res­i­dents’ clothes (in retire­ment homes).

For these teams, the game goes on, and the teams want to pur­sue their projects. “For exam­ple, dur­ing the sum­mer hol­i­days we hope to devel­op the ‘app’ and we are begin­ning to imag­ine a part­ner­ship with the City of Com­pieg­ne”, con­firms Jérôme Durand, project Cit­i­ZEN. “A long-range objec­tive of our project would be to see it uni­ver­sal­ly use­ful and spreads over a max­i­mum num­ber of cities: in this con­fig­u­ra­tion, the ‘app would update itself as it moves into, or nears a new city. How­ev­er, we do not want to ‘jump the gun’, so to speak. Just mak­ing the app work for and in Com­pieg­ne is going to require loads of work, but at the same time it will allow us to adjust para­me­ters to have the ‘app’ fit urban prob­lems even better”. The PicatchUS team has the ambi­tion to pur­sue the project to its end: “The ‘app’ base enables instan­ta­neous shar­ing of the pho­tos with a group of friends and fam­i­ly dur­ing a giv­en event in a total­ly safe man­ner, adds Nico­las Zan­tour, a UTC grad­u­ate. Even for the par­tic­i­pants exte­ri­or to UTC, the sto­ry goes on “I would like to see com­put­er sci­ence stu­dents col­lab­o­rate for some of the ‘app’ devel­op­ments accom­pa­nied by our Project leader”, announces Fab­rice Faradèche. The adven­ture goes on too for the orga­niz­ers of the Start-up Week­end: “The con­cept has been test­ed and cer­ti­fied and we now know exact­ly what our audi­ence expect and the process we must fol­low for the next edi­tion, in the 2015 sec­ond semester”.

www.citizen-app.co

http://picatchus.com