NVC alumnus wins Shell Live Wire Award

Maikel Beerens of Xilloc has won the 2011 edition of the Shell Live Wire Award. The award recognizes the economic and societal impact that the innovative implants of Xilloc may have for patients across the globe. Maikel Beerens participated in the first edition of the extra-curricular New Venture Creation course that the MC4E provides to students, alumni, university staff and others with ambitious plans for entrepreneurial ventures. The course assisted Maikel in translating a product and service concept into a business.

Weine.de, a Female BPC 2011 Finalist, launched



Finding suitable wines for every occasion – this simple goal can pose a problem for wine beginners. On these grounds Anja and Frido, two students from Maastricht University, presented Weine.de at the 20th Female Business Plan Competition on May 13th 2011.  The webshop is specifically dedicated to people with low or no experience with wine.

Through a special set of tools embedded in the website, the entrepreneurs pursue the goal of systematically recommending suitable wines for customers’ wishes, just as professional sales consultants in local wine stores do. “Unexperienced Customers are usually not able to express their wishes”, says Anja “nevertheless, they know which flavours they like, or who they are going to give a present”. After several months of intense development, financing and acquisition, the first version of www.weine.de finally went online in November.

For more information visit:

www.weine.de

GERMAN STARTUP BEATS THE DRAGONS

Tobias Modjesch of Germany won the finale of the European entrepreneurship competition Meet the Dragons 2011 with YOUCOOK, a company that wants to take over the European consumer market with its healthy and fresh ready-to-eat meals.

Over 700 people were in Rotterdam to attend the event, held in conjunction with Global Entrepreneurship Week 2011.

Seven European finalists had 2.5 minutes each to convince the Dragons — a panel of top international entrepreneurs — that his or her start-up was going to be the next big thing. After a first selection by the Dragons, the audience chose Modjesch as the winner. Only a few votes behind was the Dutch startup Zebralegal run by Conny Bergsma and Bastiaan de Wit, who came in second place. In his thank you speech, Modjesch said he felt lucky to be chosen as the audience favorite, especially because the Germans had just beat the Dutch in a football match the previous evening.

As winner of the public’s prize, Modjesch opened the Amsterdam Stock Exchange the following morning. He was in the company of an international delegation including Ted Zoller of the Kauffman Foundation, Henk Keilman, top entrepreneur and known from the KRO program ‘Dragons Den’, and Nevzat Aydin, a renowned Turkish entrepreneur and investor.

To read more go to unleashingideas.org .

 

Maastricht student entrepreneur wins 3DS Amsterdam

If you want to try Indonesian food in Maastricht, you must go to one of the two Indonesian restaurants in town. This is problematic because restaurant food is expensive, it is not entirely healthy since it usually contains lots of salt, oil and additives to make it taste better, and even though they try to re-create the cultural ambience of the food, they rarely succeed entirely, which leaves you eating a meal that is detached from the social context where it comes from. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a platform through which people could experience home-cooked, healthy and authentic meals?

That’s what Samuel Tettner is working on. “When I was in rural south India, one of the memories I treasure the most was when I shared the fish I caught with local Tamil fishermen. We want to create a platform through which everyone can enjoy these types of experiences”. Tettner is a Venezuelan graduate student at the department of Technology and Society studies at Maastricht University. He is also part of the pre-incubator program at the Maastricht Centre for Entrepreneurship. With the help and support of the centre, Samuel has been carefully crafting his idea of a system for people to break free from the hold of restaurants. The hard work paid off; Tettner recently attended a startup event for student entrepreneurs called three day startup. Three day startup puts together a selective team of programmers, designers, marketing and legal experts in a room and leaves them for three days. After the third day, the young minds have come up with a business proto-type which is then pitched to a panel of investors.

 

Tettner’s idea, www.dishout.in, was well received at 3DS, receiving the most number of votes in the final round of voting. Tettner is not working alone; he has a multi-cultural team of designers, programmers and others, all equally as passionate about creating valuable experiences through food as he is. The dishout team is currently conceptualizing ways to adapt the plan to facilitate cultural exchanges between travelers and locals in developing countries. In many parts of the world, cooking skills are the only type of skills that people have, and this project can be a way to provide economic livelihood.

Tettner plans to use all the intellectual resources available at The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences to strengthen the project. He believes that such an idea has aspects which can be interesting for philosophers, historians, anthropologists and the like to analyze. He also believes a startup website is a great platform for two groups who do not talk to each other much, the academic and the internet- entrepreneurial, to get meaningful dialogues going on.

 

For more information Tettner can be reached by email at Tettner@gmail.com