Demo Night of AWAKE - our student entrepreneurship accelerator program

The Demo Night, the pitching event of the AWAKE course, took place on 07/12/2021. The goal of the Demo Night is to present the teams' startup ideas in front of a jury in a 3-minute pitch. The course as well as the Demo Night was organized by the Institute of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Science.

AWAKE  - Become a startup in six weeks lets students take their first steps and experience towards founding a company. AWAKE is an interdisciplinary qualification program at the University of Stuttgart which takes six weeks. Here, teams have 2-3 sessions every two weeks, which take about 4 hours. Participants mostly find their team members at the beginning of the course, when some of them present their idea and it is rated via the Sparked Idea tool. Each semester, teams that have already developed an idea also participate. During the program, the teams learn with short inputs and working sessions how to develop an idea with the Lean Startup approach. Starting with customer interviews and identification of stakeholders to session about pretotyping, value proposition and business model, the whole circle is covered. During this process, they are supported by coaches from the institute and students taking the key qualification "T3-Train-the-trainer". This semester, the teams received their pitch training from Louisa Becker and participated in the Lunch Challenge. Here, teams present their idea in the same format as Demo Night and are judged by a panel of judges. Teams receive valuable feedback that they can use for the Demo Night. The Demo Night is the big final of the AWAKE program where the teams can win additional project budget. This time, team AiYFA won the audience award and Team Alpine Hydro Solution won the jury award. Overall, six teams (21 participants) took part in the AWAKE course: Hylo Technologies, AiYFA, Alpine Hydro Solutions, Wind it up, Boxxage and the Climate Rescue. We would like to thank all jury members, guest speakers and supporters for their valuable input to make this format a success.