Last Friday (22), the final of Inova Jovem 2021 took place, the biggest competition in the area of entrepreneurship for young people in high school and technical education in the country, organized by the Unicamp Innovation Agency (Inova). The final stage of the program brought together 220 people to simultaneously watch, online, the revelation of the big winner: the WeCode team, made up of members from five schools in the states of São Paulo and Minas Gerais.
The winning project seeks a solution to the lack of Information Technology (IT) professionals. The group is made up of Kauã Dias dos Santos, Kayky de Brito dos Santos, Leonardo Damas, Pedro de Oliveira and Luísa Salles, who were responsible for defending the business model developed at the final event.
According to data presented by the WeCode team, the country has more IT vacancies than professionals trained per year. To try to meet the demand of this expanding market, encourage students to continue in the profession and bring their working relationships closer, the team's idea was to create clubs to promote opportunities, learning and networking between students and professionals in the field. Each member of the winning team will receive a prize of one thousand reais and a winner's certificate.
The 8th Edition of Inova Jovem repeated last year's online format and received 360 registered participants, distributed across 88 teams. Of these, 13 were from cities outside the State of São Paulo. For the associate director of Inova Unicamp, Renato Lopes, the program allows many young people to have their first contact with entrepreneurship:
"Inova promotes the initiative and offers the tools, giving young people the opportunity to insert entrepreneurship and innovation into their lives before they even enter graduation. The number of young people capable of generating a business model, as we saw in the competition, is incredible. Furthermore, it is a program that brings together students from all over Brazil, like the champion team, made up of students from São Paulo and Minas Gerais”, points out Lopes.
The six finalist teams presented their pitches of their business models for a bank. There was also an evaluation by popular vote. The presentations can be seen in full on the channel Inova Unicamp Youtube here.
The Inova Jovem 2021 examining board was made up of Alexandra Rodrigues, innovation manager at Agi; Daniel Ivasse, development manager at Matera; Iago Righi, representative of Junior Companies (EJs); and Roseane Ramos, managing partner of Agência Sabiá and advisor to Unicamp Ventures.
Category: Popular Vote
Also awarded in the Popular Vote category was the TechPeriods team, formed by students Isabela Martins Rocha, Marina dos Santos Gonçalves, Natalia Mansano and Thaline de Carvalho, all from the Industrial Technical College “Professor Isaac Portal Roldán”, in Bauru (SP).
TechPeriods' business model, aligned with the third UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) (Health and Wellbeing), proposes an informative application for women. It also captures resources for purchase and donation of tampons, aiming to minimize the problem of menstrual poverty, which affects around four in ten women, according to research carried out by Johnson & Johnson Consumer Health. The students will receive certificates as winners in the category.
About Inova Jovem
Inova Jovem was created in 2014 with the aim of presenting entrepreneurship as a professional career to young people from all over Brazil. Since then, there have been seven editions of the competition and the training of more than 2 thousand students from regular and technical high schools. With the event, the Inova Unicamp Innovation Agency seeks to broaden the horizons of young people by fostering a culture of entrepreneurship and innovation.
2021 Sponsors: Agibank, Matera, Colégio Poliedro and Via Consulting
2021 Supporters: Fundação Educar Dpaschoal, Secretariat of Economic, Social and Tourism Development, ComVest and Unicamp 2022 Vestibular
Original article published on the Inova Unicamp Innovation Agency website.
