The students' self-government is a key factor in a university development, in a personality's formation. They can become entrepreneurs, leaders in innovation. A team of the Tempus project "NEFESIE" carries out this work in a way of adapting of high education level in European universities to Ukrainian ones. With accepted new law in the Ukraine "About High Education", universities feel a need to change existing regulations more urgently.

Recently Garage48 took place in Lviv for the first time. Garage48 (G48) is an international event allowing participants to present their business ideas, consult with experts, receive a feedback from investors, form a team and as a result to create a prototype of their project and all this within 48 hours during a weekend.

Two weeks before the hackaton on the initiative of Maxym Lysak, CEO and co-founder of Lviv Startup Depot Ragnar Saas, a serial startup entrepreneur and a founder of startup boot camp Garage48 in his native Estonia met with students of Lviv Polytechnic National University. Within Garage48 Ragnar has organized more than 20 hackatons in a range of countries including Eastern Europe, thus helping to develop startups and entrepreneurship. Due to hackatons more than 10 startups are already created and successfully developing popular products.

«The knowledge triangle in practice»

How to establish an entrepreneurship environment that brings together students, business and researches.

A wider objective of the Tempus project National Education Famework for Enhancing IT Students’ Innovation and Entrepreneurship is to provide a strategic support and lasting impact on Ukrainian higher education, in establishing a structural change towards an educational system that promotes students’ creativity, Innovation and entrepreneurship in the IT related degree programs. This will include extensive promotion of knowledge triangle instantiations that involve educational programs, researchers and companies. The aim is to enable Ukrainian universities to be more aligned to the labour market needs and to be promoters of the economics development.

As a result of the project plan, our consortium members Ikea and Sigma Technology initiated and instantiated a knowledge triangle that blended researchers, students and company experts in a joint project.

Lviv IT Arena Conference took place on October 2-4'2014. One of numberous interesting tracks was startups. Famous IT-entrepreneurs shared their experience on growing startups.

Dmytro Voloshyn gave a helicopter view on how to build startup quicker and cheaper using one of the most famous approaches Lean-startup methodology

Peter Bondarevsky analyzed the factors of startup failures and shared advices how to avoid failure on the very early stage of your startup.

Dmytro Baryskyy described the typical mistakes of those ukrainian startups that attempt to get money for their projects through collective fundraising. Eugene Plohoj in his presentation “Product Creation: From Zero to Release” touched on all the issues concerning startups, from looking for a proper idea to marketing. Max Ischenko shared lessons from personal experience of building djinni.co and considered the following actual issues: starting alone vs finding co-founders, how to charge real money from real users, when hiring an employee is a bad idea etc.