Octo­ber 2019, UTC’s Inno­va­tion and Ter­ri­to­r­i­al Devel­op­ment Depart­ment organ­ised the first edi­tion of a “Creathon”. The objec­tive? To intro­duce stu­dents to entre­pre­neur­ship and the cre­ation of start-ups. 

Two days to bring out inno­v­a­tive projects and find start-up ideas. This is the ambi­tious project that some fifty stu­dents from UTC and Uni­LaSalle (Beau­vais) took on last Octo­ber. Gath­ered at the UTC’s Daniel Thomas Inno­va­tion Cen­tre for the University’s very first Creathon, they worked in teams on the emer­gence of new projects. “What I real­ly liked about the Creathon is that the orga­niz­ers real­ly taught us how to inno­vate,” says Flo­rent Mey­er, a com­put­er engi­neer­ing stu­dent. They taught us a lot of con­cepts and meth­ods to find a project and above all to be cre­ative in the pro­posed solu­tions. “Con­cepts such as ideation, design think­ing and val­ue propo­si­tion were pre­sent­ed to the stu­dents. These are not dis­ci­plines that we are used to study­ing in class,” says Mar­tin de Beaulieu, a final year stu­dent. “So it was real­ly inter­est­ing to be able to dis­cov­er them dur­ing this weekend. » 

Among the projects pro­posed by the stu­dents: a con­nect­ed muf­fler, an appli­ca­tion to share food or a col­lec­tive, con­nect­ed com­poster. It was the lat­ter project that aroused the enthu­si­asm of the jury. “The project is sim­ple, it’s a com­poster installed in build­ings that allows res­i­dents to work with a local farmer,” explains Mar­tin de Beaulieu, a mem­ber of the win­ning team. Before their pitch, the team went through many steps. “Once we had the draft of our project on paper, we went out into the streets to meet poten­tial users and get their opin­ions. We real­ized that there were a lot of things wrong with our project,” he says. So the team worked over and over again to per­fect his project and pro­to­type. All under the watch­ful eye of coach­es from the entre­pre­neur­ial com­mu­ni­ty. “It was real­ly pre­cious to have pro­fes­sion­als to help us. They gave us a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive on our project,” says Mar­tin. “For exam­ple, at a time when we were stuck on the solu­tion to our prob­lem, they asked us to think about a solu­tion that would ampli­fy the prob­lem, just the oppo­site of what we want­ed! And think­ing back­wards allowed us to come up with new ideas for our real prototype.” 

Vir­ginie Lamarche who ini­ti­at­ed the idea of a Creathon, had not­ed — as an inno­va­tion engi­neer at UTC: “For the past 10 years, we have been orga­niz­ing a com­pe­ti­tion for inno­v­a­tive projects at the school to enable stu­dents to set up their start-up. I noticed that many stu­dents were attract­ed by inno­va­tion and entre­pre­neur­ship but didn’t have a clue about it” have she explains. “So I got this idea to organ­ise a UTC Creathon to help them sort out their ideas, and this, before the com­pe­ti­tion for inno­v­a­tive projects.” And for Vir­ginie, this first edi­tion was a great suc­cess. “We had stu­dents, coach­es and facil­i­ta­tors involved and very hap­py to have spent a week­end at the Daniel Thomas Inno­va­tion cen­tre”. Want a proof? The end-of-week­end cock­tail par­ty (often desert­ed in the events) remained full until the Inno­va­tion Cen­tre closed.