In the summer of 2022, I was one of five students from the Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal (IPS) to take part in the European Innovation Academy (EIA), held at the Estoril Congress Centre. The academy, with its motto "from an idea to a startup in 15 days", brought together 500 young people from 75 countries and awarded 16 projects in its second Portuguese edition.
At the time I was a final-year Computer Engineering student at the Setúbal School of Technology and I joined the team that built PROCO, a platform connecting students, companies, and universities to fix part of what is broken in the recruitment market. The idea came from a simple frustration: many academic projects are fictitious and end without any real outcome for the student's CV. PROCO let companies submit real projects that students, coordinated with their professors, could deliver as part of their coursework.
PROCO was selected for the top 10 best ideas and received six months of mentoring from the consultancy Dybaw Venture Capital. Stepping on stage on the last day, as the only Portuguese voice in my international team, is hard to put into words.
From IPS, SmartCap — by my colleague Mariana Luciano (Computer Engineering) — was also awarded, with a provisional patent filing through Nixon Peabody: a reusable bottle that measures how much water you drink.
The edition was supported by Santander Universidades and the Cascais City Council as main partners, and it ended on August 3, 2022.
##What stayed with me
More than the prize, three lessons stuck with me that I still use every day:
- Constraints breed creativity. Three weeks is very little time. It forced clear decisions about scope and MVP — the kind of decisions six-month projects defer until the last sprint. We executed in 15 days steps that some companies take months to go through.
- Clarity of problem beats sophistication of solution. The winning teams had a sharply defined problem. The others had pretty technology looking for a problem.
- Learning to sell an idea matters as much as building it. Standing on stage and explaining PROCO to investors and judges taught me as much as any line of code I wrote during the programme.
It was one of the most memorable experiences of my academic journey — and it still shapes the way I look at R&D, teams, and product.