From our partners at the U.S. Department of State GIST Network: 
https://www.gistnetwork.org/gist-innovates-ukraine-program-engages-innovators-showcases-success

GIST Innovates Ukraine

A Program to Catalyze Entrepreneurship

Next month, the Global Innovation through Science and Technology (GIST) initiative will showcase our latest cohort of industrious innovators at the GIST Innovates Ukraine Digital Demo Day. On December 1, 2020, GIST will host this event as the culmination of an 8-week accelerated, intensive training in Lean Startup process.

Through the course, 18 three-person teams, made up of the best early-stage Ukrainian innovators, focused on using agile customer discovery to identify and evaluate scalable opportunities, allowing participants to make informed decisions on the best approach for moving forward with commercialization of their innovation.

While all GIST Innovates Ukraine participants will be eligible to apply for a spot in the upcoming GIST Business Incubation program, two especially market-ready Ukrainian teams will be selected to participate in this international entrepreneurship program scheduled to take place in 2021.

 

A Day to Celebrate Successes

The Digital Demo Day will feature pitches from the 18 startups who will also share next steps for their venture and lessons learned along their journey. Throughout the program, GIST has already seen great strides and successes within the cohort.

For example, team RAIM, whose product is a smart, interactive robotic mannequin for clothes advertising and on-site shopping assistance, has been accepted into STARTA Ventures Accelerator. As the team points out, the main purposes of such mannequins are to attract the buyers’ attention, increase in-store sales and number of visits to the store, by interacting with the buyers. The mannequins also keep statistics of potential buyers for the owner.

Another great example is team Melytix has gotten traction on their product and made several sales since entering the GIST Innovates program. Their product, Melytix, is a platform for convenient viewing and quick analysis of data from various services such as Google Analytics, Google Adwords, Mailchimp and others. The team has targeted a local market size of at least 350,000 active sites who are connected to Google Analytics in the Ukraine alone and similar projects that implement the function of a dashboard but without the analytics function.

And lastly, team Krovospas has begun a contract with the military to test and provide use cases for their product, Krovospas, a next-generation hemostatic agent and a range of devices that stop arterial bleeding within moments. Designed for emergency and civil applications, Krovospas devices, applied with manual pressure to the wound, initiate clotting to save lives.

The goal of GIST Innovates is to provide innovators with the training, mentoring, and resources they need to bring their ideas out of the university lab and into the market. The accelerated program takes participants through an intensive customer discovery process to quickly identify and evaluate opportunities and make informed decisions on how best to move their idea forward. You can learn more about the program here.