“You make us proud as a country,” declared Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, addressing the young Greek “start-ups” winners of the Pan-European Innovation and Entrepreneurship Awards, whom he met yesterday. a few days ago, at the Maximos Palace. .
The Prime Minister praised the importance of children’s success and stressed that everything can start from an idea, but it requires close cooperation and a lot of work to get to implementation.
“We work well together when we want to and when we realize that only through cooperation can we move towards common goals,” he said. I have spoken to many groups of young children who have been involved in this process. “You have made us proud as a country.”
Kyriakos Mitsotakis also spoke about “start-ups” and the creations they have developed.
Particularly for Swim.me, which won first prize in the JA Europe Enterprise Challenge 2021 Pan-European Student Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition with the “smart” cap for the visually impaired and FlowOn, which won second prize in the Competition European student of innovation and innovation JA Europe Company of the year 2021 with the “smart faucet” which fights against water waste and the transmission of germs.
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“You have made us proud. You realize that everything starts with an idea, but it also takes a lot of work to get to the point of implementation. This whole process: how you organize a team, how you think about building a business, you see the complexity behind producing a new product or service. I think these are all very useful lessons, which will accompany you throughout your life,” Mr. Mitsotakis noted, adding that “we also want to teach such concepts of creative entrepreneurship, much more in schools.”
The Prime Minister stressed that “your own experiences make it easier for us to break certain stereotypes” and added:
“We work together when we want to and when we realize that only through cooperation can we achieve common goals. A team must work together. And I think you have to learn to manage the complexity and diversity of a team, the different ideas, the tensions that can arise, to finally arrive at a common component. Because I imagine you will also experience that not everything goes as planned. There are difficulties, there are different points of view. You have to find a way to resolve these tensions, these differences, and a collective intelligence within the group that is strangely greater than the sum of the individual intelligences of each of you. This is the great beauty of teamwork. One thing is certain: whatever you choose to do, whatever you choose to study, you will always have to work as a team. » He added that “for those of you who finally choose the path of entrepreneurship, I think you will always have very strong experiences within you. I wish and hope that through your support, these experiences after passing them on to younger children, I imagine that there will be thoughts and ideas on how you can, for example, go and speak in schools to younger children and have them tell your own story. So that this thing can become something much bigger than it is today.”
The Prime Minister concluded by saying: “First and foremost, to congratulate you once again for your efforts. It’s not easy when you first have to think about how you are going to manage your free time, beyond and beyond classes and I’m glad you chose this path to be able to do something that is very important for you but also important for the country. It is a great honor for all of us to be able to excel in such competitions at European and global levels. And of course to highlight the great, very important and decisive contribution of Junior Achievement. It is an organization that passionately supports youth entrepreneurship, which now finds its place in the official programs of the Ministry of Education. I think only good things will come out of this choice and no matter what you end up doing, I think you will always have good memories of your experience working together and how different you were. And with the good of course, not only to leave this idea on paper, but also to become a final product, because the goal of the company, a new company, is ultimately to be able to produce a product or a service that has value and the value is captured through sales and profitability. This is not the only importance of a business, you see now that there is a whole debate in the global business community that the purpose of businesses is not just profit, but that they have a broader responsibility towards society as a whole. I think these are all concepts you already know and I’m very happy about that. Congratulations again.”
What young people say
For his part, David Begjanian, head of the FlowOn team, emphasized that “the truth is that through this program we have seen the importance of entrepreneurship. It is very important, in addition to teaching entrepreneurship, to support it and the State. We are happy to see that the state supports this. Of course, we also thank Junior Achievement for everything they have given us this year. Thank you for the honor of hosting us. »
Rania Vlachou, CEO of Swim.me, said: “This quarantine period was a way out for us. To be creative, productive and indeed we had all the help from Junior Achievement. We are very happy with the result. Indeed, entrepreneurship must be present in both universities and colleges. »
Both competitions took place as part of Junior Achievement Europe’s largest European GEN-E entrepreneurship festival. It started online on June 29 at the Lithuanian headquarters of Junior Achievement and culminated on Thursday July 15, 2021 with the presentation of prizes to Greek students who excelled among the 370,000 young people who participated in the two European competitions during the school year. 2020-21. It is worth noting that this is the first time in the 16-year history of Junior Achievement Greece that Greek teams have won the first and second pan-European prizes and these successes give rise to great optimism for the future.
Swim.me
Swim.me is an “intelligent” assistance system for visually impaired swimmers. In the swimmer’s cap are goggles with sensors so that the athlete is alerted by vibrations of the exact moment of the turn and their position on the pool track. The system, through an IoT application, also records data and analytics on the athlete’s performance and development in training. The device is aimed at both professionals and amateurs but also at children suffering from total or partial blindness, offering them the possibility of total autonomy in the pool and improving their psychological mood. Its leaders are students of the Athens University of Economics and Commerce and the National Technical University of Athens.
Flow enabled
FlowOn’s student startuppers came from the University of Macedonia’s experimental high school and won second prize in the pan-European student innovation and entrepreneurship competition JA Europe Company of the Year 2021. They were distinguished among 40 students in start-ups around the world. Europe, the “smart faucet” that fights against water waste and the transmission of germs. The innovative accessory they created applies to simple outdoor faucets and transforms them into “smart” faucets that open and close intact and automatically. The “Flow On” accessory can be widely used in schools, parks, other public spaces and home gardens, achieving significant water savings and ideal hygienic conditions, while the group is composed of 20 children from classes A’, B’ and C of high school.
SOURCE: AMNA