BAKU, Azerbaijan, Mar.12
By Sadraddin Aghjayev – Trend:
The Azerbaijani Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship - ‘Barama’, began implementing its incubation program in January 2021, Zaur Unsi-Zadeh, the center’s program manager told Trend.
According to Unsi-Zadeh, the incubation differs from the pre-acceleration program (launched by the center in January last year) in its designation for projects that have a minimum product.
"In fact, we aren’t working with teams from scratch now. The main requirement for a team is availability of a minimum product and two participants possessing technical and business knowledge," he added.
The manager noted that the program consists of two parts.
"The first part is online, and the second one - offline. Since the pre-acceleration program fell on the period of the COVID-19 pandemic, we had to implement it online. Within this program, various events, mentoring sessions were held weekly. Our mentors are local and foreign specialists, as well as employees of other advanced big IT companies," he further said.
Unsi-Zadeh also noted that three months later, the acceleration program began to be implemented offline, when startup creators were able to visit the center's office, present their projects there and receive appropriate recommendations, investments, mentoring revisions, and others.
"During implementation of this program, our projects have achieved many successes in terms of partnership with other companies and expansion of their business plans. Our investment programs are being implemented jointly with the Innovation Agency. In June this year, we are planning to hold an online event - 'DemoDay', which will attract a number of foreign and local investors and where our teams will present their projects," said the manager.
Holding of such an event, according to him, will help attract foreign direct investment to the local start-up projects from both investors and venture funds.
"We, as a center, create conditions for our startup creators, so that they can develop their projects and bring them to global platforms," Unsi-Zadeh said.
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