This weekend, a group of passionate students and young entrepreneurs, got together at Ministry of Culture’s main hall to create and present their business plans, with focus on boosting cultural heritage role’s in developing tourism in Albania.
Startup Weekend Tirana is a 54 hour network of people who are interested in developing, designing and marketing their business ideas. These young entrepreneurs get together for a weekend to create teams, present ideas, craft products and compete for the grand prize of bring their idea to life. It’s the fourth time that Starup Weekend is taking place in Albania, but this year, for the first time, its focus was innovation in the sector of tourism and cultural heritage. The event was organized with the support of CHwB Albania, Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Economic Development, Tourism, Trade and Entrepreneurship.
Around 50 students and young professionals participated in this year’s Startup Weekend Tirana, to present 11 innovative ideas on who to make cultural heritage an important part of tourism development. On Friday, participants of Startup Weekend Tirana presented their business ideas and got into groups.
Saturday, the future entrepreneurs worked on their ideas, to turn them into business models, and this included identifying main partners, cost structure, revenue, activities, channels of communication and aimed audiences. Mentors, from different areas of expertise, such as tourism, enterprenuership, finance and law, were at hand, offering advice for a successful model. Sunday afternoon participants gave the finishing touches to their projects, including the preparation of a communication and marketing plan, and at 17:00 they presented their future business models. Among the presented models were ciceroni.com, a platform for connecting guides with foreign tourists; Digital Heritage, which foresaw the mapping of all monuments of culture in Albania; 3D Musem, which included setting up a digital museum in Gjirokastra.
The jury, composed of Lejla Hadzic from CHwB Albania, Shkëlzen Marku from Yunus Social Business, Etleva Sakajeva from Tirana Business Part, Erion Nako from SAP West Balkans and Lorenc Cala from State Authority for Geospatial Information (ASIG), chose as the winner of this edition the project called Tung AL. The second prize went to Motive Shqiptare, while 3D Museum was the winner of the third place.
Cicero and Tung AL were also the recipient of the special prize awarded by Talent Garden Tirana.