Tbilisi Creative Center

For the purpose of integrating culture and innovation, Tbilisi Creative Center was founded in Tbilisi History Museum 'KARVASLA'

Within Creative Spark Higher Education Enterprise Program, Business and Technology University, Henley Business School and Tbilisi History Museum ‘Karvasla’ have founded the Creative Center.

The aim of Tbilisi Creative Center is to support the development of the start-up ecosystem of Georgia, extending this from its existing focus on digital entrepreneurship to the creative sector. The Georgian economy continues to mature and develop, but Georgian entrepreneurs’ entrepreneurial skills and capabilities remain underdeveloped. The project will focus on facilitating the development of a best-practice university center for entrepreneurship and its associated infrastructure in Georgia. This will provide the institutional structure to build capacity within Georgia for responding to local requirements and support the development of skills among students and young creative entrepreneurs, to support new business creation and incubation on a sustainable basis.

Henley Business School’s HCfE will help its consortium partners BTU, the enterprise cluster in the National Museum of Georgia and the Tbilisi Creative Centre in upskilling this sector.

Partners of Business and Technology University partners are Georgian National Museum, Creative Spark and Henley business school which is number 10 from the best entrepreneurial centers in the world rankings.

Tbilisi Creative Center gives great opportunity individuals to create Startups, to seek international partners, to improve their Business English skills, to communicate and work with foreign and local experts. This project also is a great opportunity for entrepreneurs to participate in international competition and to make their start-up commercialized around the WORLD market.

English Learning Program - English Channel is a platform offered by the British Council for startups in the limits of Tbilisi Creative Center.

Modules of the project

The modules will be modelled by Henley Business School and will support best practice in higher education action learning pedagogies, making students work both independently, and in groups, leading to the development of time-management and team working skills.

The following extra-curricular activities will take place:

The “Idea hub”
The Spring Start-Up Boot Camp
The Business Idea Clinic
Best Start-up competition and IDEAFEST
English Learning Program

Part one: The "Idea hub"

The “Idea hub” which will open regularly at the Creative Centre. The Hub will have guest visitor every week end to explore topics in design and engineering with artistic circuits, 3D printing, chain reactions, and a variety of other hands-on making and tinkering topics. Drop in each week and try out one of our many activities which link engineering with the everyday life objects that could be commercialised.

Over the first year on weekends the session will include:

3D Printing and Design
Learn how to design in three dimensions and explore how 3D printers can turn digital models into reality.
App Inventor
Explore how to invent an app and develop your own app for a smartphone or tablet.
Data Sculptures
Build unique physical representations as you explore interesting ways to visualise and tell stories with data.
Kinetic Sculptures
Create a unique moving art piece engineered to move with gears, cams, linkages, and pulleys.
Paper Circuits
Use copper tape and LEDs to create your own artistic light-up cards, paper models, and more.
Programming with Scratch
Design your own simple video game or animation using the block-based programming language Scratch
Visualizing the Brain
Compare imaging through light microscopes with the power of expansion microscopy. Create your own drawing of a brain cell and be a citizen scientist to help neuroscientists map the human brain.
Sewn Circuits Construct a working and wearable circuit using LEDs, batteries, and conductive thread.

These activities are important to starting the first business as it teaches participants how to minimize start-up cost (for example through building an app, monitoring online activities) and commercializing product.

Demo Day

Part two: The Spring Start-Up Boot Camp

The Spring Start-Up Boot Camp is a hands-on, week-long course for students and local young entrepreneurs to help them learn about setting up a business from scratch. Young entrepreneurs may or may not be BTU students. This is important as it links students to a broader business community. The Boot Camp will be subscribed and offered to BTU students across the university and will focus on using digital technologies and four major sectors to start business: ICT, Knowledge intense business services, creative sector and education.

The topics to discuss include:

How to start a business with no money
How to build a website for free and get onto Google
How to set up a company (e.g. registration and meeting tax and legal requirements)
How to find the confidence to launch a business

Part three: The Business Idea Clinic

The Business Idea Clinic, a service that affords students and recent alumni the opportunity to obtain advice about their business idea. The Clinic, will open its door as soon as the project application will be announced successful and will offers students a 30 minute session with an experienced entrepreneur or investor, who will provide guidance to students on their business idea and help them determine viability for development.

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Part four: Best Start-up competition and IDEAFEST

Best Start-up competition and IDEAFEST competitions which will be matched to the Student Enterprise Award (Video Pitch Competition) later in the year. Best Start-up competition and IDEAFEST will help students to better prepare for the Student Enterprise Award “”Video pitch” competition. A selection of finalists will be competing for the coveted titles of Best Start-Up and Best Innovation and the opportunity to win 1000 euro cash prizes, as well as the chance to be mentored by the sponsors. The five finalists teams will be judged by an expert panel, including representatives from the sponsors, who will choose winners for two categories: the best start-up that has made the most progress over the last twelve months and in particular has built revenues and customer traction. The judges are looking for start-ups that have built innovative products or services that disrupt the market. Entrants must be able to demonstrate that there has been a demand for the innovation and that the innovation has proved to be successful.

Part five: English Learning Program

Within the project participants are able to use the English Channel and The English Select programs, set up by the British Council to improve the language skills for each participant.

Please find the report link per each activity here.

60 second pitches

Explaining your idea clearly is one of most important skills needed to make your idea come to life. Target audience must easily understand product or service and see why it is useful for them. We helped startups to do this in 60 second and helped them to focus on the most important points to support their ideas!

Areal - Augmented reality Digital guide in museum

Group members: Merab Laliashvili, Rezi Farulava, Mariam Beraia
Startup name: Areal

It's common knowledge, that problems are in museums so actual, guide price is very expensive and service is bad. Also, museum is a conservation place and need more innovation. So, we have a great digital guide platform, AReal , which is based on Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence technology . Our app has audio , text and entertainment features and today it works in Georgian 4 museums and Baku 1 museum(Carpet museum in Baku)

Blick - SoundCloud for painters and Shazam for paintings

Group members: Vakhtang Ghudushauri, Nika Gogoladze, Davit Bokhua
Startup name: Blick

It is difficult for painters to grow their popularity. My friend was not popular painter during 4 years. After this time people discovered him and now his creations costs expensive. We want to reduce this time and make it easier to grow popularity.
Second problem is that it is difficult to detect unknown painters from their paintings. It is subsection of first big problem.

 

Feel Reality - With the help of virtual reality, you can go back to the past and attend the events of the museum

Group members: Mirza Jijieshvili, Simon Tchichiashvili
Startup name: Feel Reality

We often have a case when overloaded schedule: because of the work experience or other problems we can not attend the event that we are interested in. Working hours of the museum coincide with the work schedule of the above listed institutions. It is therefore difficult to follow the events in the museum. We have created a product that will solve this problem for people who love museums with loaded graphic.

Fenix - is an application that helps people with disabilities to move and communicate easily

Group members: Goderdzi Mari
Startup name: Fenix

According to World Bank today 1 billion Disabled people cannot relocate like they want.They also have a stigma from the community.These two barriers are the biggest problem for 15% of the world's population!
These problems can become a causative cause of depression or even suicide.

Georgian Memory - company produces scarves with illustrations related to Georgia

Group members: Teona Gagnidze, Nino Jariashvili, Lia Latsabidze
Startup name: Georgian Memory

In general, there are lots of similar products in souvenir shops and tourists have to choose from these little range of variety, moreover, most of them have lack of informative content, whereas according to statistics average growth of international traveller trips in Georgia is 8%. Besides that, big companies and government organizations are getting many guests and delegations from different countries and they always have problem-choose some memorable and different gifts for them. Usually those presents are wine or book. One of the most important problem is that modern Georgian artists are less popular not only in Georgia, but also in the whole world. Our product can be problem-solving for them, that’s why we called it Georgian Memory.

Iota - creates virtual reality where you can see how author makes Art

Group members: Jemal Jikuri, Elene Kvaratskhelia, Guram Nozadze
Startup name: Iota

As we all know every field of art brings us a great pleasure, we fall in love not only with art itself but also with it's author. Unfortunately we don't have an opportunity to meet authors. Imagine what a pleasure it would be if we could see how Bach is playing one of his symphonies, or how Van Gogh is creating his masterpiece but for now this is impossible.

Old Streets Georgia - With the help of modern technology we are bringing the past to life

Group members: Gega Tatulishvili, Saba Lanchava
Startup name: Old Streets Georgia

Nowadays museums are little bit boring for some people because of frozen atmosphere. We want to make museum more interesting and amusing. For example little children are not interested in museum and they even not listening to there guides.

Sapo - Natural, handmade toy shaped mysterious soaps with its adventure books

Group members: Naili Vakhania, Tengiz Kavkasidze
Startup name: Sapo

Every child needs to wash hand. Parents have to teach their children to wash hands, for this they have to use safe and healthy products. Parents who have little children have problem with washing hands, because children don’t like washing hands. Some of them find it boring, routine, and stressful.

According to - Child health epidemiology reference group of WHO and UNICEF washing hands can prevent about 30 % diarrhea related sicknesses and about 20% of respiratory infections To avoid this parents force their children to wash hands or try to be theatrically to their children. But we mustn’t forget that forcing is stressful, being theatrical is taking too much time and children’s colorful soaps often are unnatural and unsafe. For many, the antibacterial soap that you purchase from the supermarket or pharmacy are too rough on their skin, or their skin doesn’t react well to the chemicals that are found in the soap.

Simvino - Unique Musical Wine

Group members: Guga Giorgadze
Startup name: Simvino

The problem of monotonous diversity has originated due to the resulting of big wine market.
Every manufacturer tries to present their own product differently and in many cases changes happen at the expense of the label or bottle design.
At this stage, the customer is trying to pick up a different and original product for a little bit.
The problem is often encountered by tourists who do not have enough information on the brands, so the only method of distinguishing them without tasting is visually obtained information.
On the other hand,this method loose the charm of general product. Consequently, I think that just changing the label can not give stimulation of something new in this field.

Street Art - Daily products (clothes, bags, mobile cases), covered by Georgian street art

Group members: Ekaterine Galdavadze
Startup name: Street Art

There are 3 thousand street art works is in Tbilisi street, that’s why city turns an open air museum. It’s one of the main reason why local and tourist love this city, but by weather, people or time destroying them little by little. Their living period is about 6- 12 month.
Georgian street artists are among globe artists lists and their art work become inspirational thing for many famous blogger, photographers and fashion stiller. Young local people like it but can’t save them for a long time.
For artists presenting art work in an open area is new possibility to get in touch to society and express his/her attitude without border. So, every art has his own story, meaning and emotion explain that’s why they are unique and trade mark of not only this city, country also.