The career center at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration and Center for Entrepreneurship and Project Management organised, for the second time, a competition among the students in the faculty for the best course work with entrepreneurial potential. The aim of competition, which was held on 27 March, was to stimulate and award the entrepreneurial and innovation potential and initative of the students through practical course works, developed within the studied disciplines. The main sponsor of the event was First Investment Bank and members of the jury were representatives of Data Science Society, the European Software Institute, Cargill, Management Financial Group, Pontica Solutions, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Seedet, Sutherland, Travel Mind, UNIQA, and the E-commerce Success Foundation.

The event Pitch@Feba was opened by the Dean of the faculty, Assos. Prof. Dr. Teodor Sedlarski. He presented the ambition of the faculty to be a space for entrepreneurship, to be a center of corporate, social and research innovation and partnerships.

The faculty works with representatives of the business along various pathways. The pilot edition of the e-commerce success e-commerce course is currently running in partnership with the Bulgarian e-Commerce Association and the Bulgarian Industrial Association and with the support of Gombashop. A multimedia content room for product photography, video capture with a green screen, etc. is about to open in partnership with the E-Commerce Foundation.

Prof. Tsvetan Davidkov, Head of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Project Management and Head of the Department of Business Administration, presented opportunities for supporting student entrepreneurship through scholarships and mentoring support for new entrepreneurs for training and development in partner companies in Europe, Israel, Singapore and the USA . Ilia Dechkov, a student at the faculty, founder of Hancy and a participant in Pitch @ Feba last year, already took part in the Erasmus program for young entrepreneurs with an entrepreneur from Italy.

Advice for young entrepreneurs was given by Mr. Rob Newell, investment consultant from Silicon Valley. He talked about the role of universities in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, about the strength needed to overcome failure and learn from mistakes, about the steps that entrepreneurs need to take from the initial idea to the final exit (sale of the control package) from their company.

Before the official competition, two student teams from the Entrepreneurship course of Prof. Desislava Yordanova took the floor, much like a warm-up rock band, to get feedback from the business about their projects which are still in the planning stage. The attending companies confirmed their willingness to work with students and lecturers on their coursework during the semester.

The winner of the competition was Antoaneta Dyaksova of the "Digital Marketing" master's Program and her project LiveZone developed as part of work on the m-business course taught by Assoc. Prof. Todor Yalamov. LiveZone's MVP is a GPS tracking system for orientation and running competitions. The system will compete with the more expensive solutions available on the Bulgarian market and can be upgraded to have a wider application. In her course work Antoaneta had done a market analysis, an analysis of the functional requirements for a similar system, had developed a prototype, and after the end of the semester and before the competition had tested it at another competition in Rousse. Ms. Dyaksova won 2000 leva to support the realization of her product.

Antoaneta Dyaksova, LiveZone

The second prize and the 500 leva prize was awarded to the AirSofia project of Vladimir Zakov, Kiril Genov and Dennis Stefanov, students in the "Modeling of Big Data in Business and Finance" master’s program. The course within which they developed the project is "Practice in Applied Analysis – Advanced Level". The AirSofia team also won the Special Award of the Management Financial Group, awarded by Mr. Apostol Mushmov.

Vladimir Zakov, Kiril Genov, and Denis Stefanov

The third place was given to the BeerCultureMap project of Mr. Dimitar Hristozov – fourth-year student in the Business Administration course. The prototype was developed with the help of the Esit StoryMap as a course work on the e-business course taught by Assoc. Prof. Todor Yalamov. He will get mentoring from Travel Mind to further develop his idea.

The other course works nominated among over 80 participating students were Ms. Agnes Mihova’s fitness app WODs with BROs, Miss Kristina Tsoneva’s mobile application for gaming – BOOKSEY, suitable for bookstores and Mr. Todor Tzvetanov’sh idea for a mobile application - digital hotel key - DigitalKey.