EURAXESS Startup Hub Serbia

Welcome to EURAXESS Startup Hub Serbia

EURAXESS Startup Hub Serbia

Are you a researcher working in Serbian university or research institute with entrepreneurship career goal?

We are developing technological mentoring and coaching programs in some of the most disruptive technologies today
Our innovation assessment schemes helps turning a great PhD thesis into even greater innovation product
Learn about the key concepts of scientific startup entrepreneurship, in our digital handbook, a part of EURAXESS Startup Hub Digital Toolkit
Get to know the basics of writing successful research proposal by taking part in our training schemes on access to funding

Are you university, faculty or research institute in Serbian research landscape with a strategic priority of developing services for aspiring sci-entrepreneurs?

Read about the best practices for effective, collaborative and inclusive startup support in academic organizations in our EURAXESS Startup Hub Digital Toolkit
Participate in our trainings related to access to funding for Horizon Europe and other schemes
Partner with us in organizing different events for aspiring sci-entrepreneurs
Promote our services to the researchers working your organization

Are you an industry representative with a problem that requires a scientific solution?

Join our reverse innovation schemes for setting up a sustainable industry-academia collaborations around the scientific solutions for your industrial problems.

EURAXESS Startup Hub Serbia

Who we are?

The Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the University of Niš (MEF) is a higher education establishment, a part of the University of Niš with 13 faculties and more than 26000 students enrolled.

MEF is acting EURAXESS BHO organization, Coordinator of the national EURAXESS Services network and administrator of the national EURAXESS portal. MEF has participated or is participating in a number of Framework Programme and Horizon 2020 projects, where it implemented different training programs, deployed online collaboration and promotional solutions and worked on the national and regional research policy issues. It contributed to the EURAXESS network with highly innovative tools and solutions, such as EURAXESS Digital assistant (instructional chatbot) and in-depth analysis of EURAXESS Jobs dataset.

MEF has long experience in training, mentorship, promotion and implementation activities in different entrepreneurship aspects. It implements the programs with significant impact to a local startup community, such as:

Summer school of technological entrepreneurship,
Artificial Intelligence Info Days,
Academic course on Startup entrepreneurship,
Guest lectures for first-year students on entrepreneurial careers,
CIM seminars connecting industry and academic researchers and
Round tables on scientific entrepreneurship.

Our environment

About Serbian startup ecosystem

Serbian startup ecosystem is small but one of the fastest growing in Europe, currently in activation phase. It raised 143 MEUR in last 10 years with EU countries as the most important investor (70% take).

When considering the investments, gaming and Blockchain are the two most attractive sectors in Serbian startup arena. Some of the most critical factors for growth are world-class engineering education (with more than 3300 graduates in Software Engineering each year), waivers on tax and contributions on salaries and tax incentives.

The Digital Serbia Initiative estimates the total value of the Serbian ecosystem (with approx. 300 startups) at 502MUSD. 78% of the companies are export-oriented, while nearly 60% are in the B2B domain. Two of the most notable success stories are Nordeus (mobile game development company based in Belgrade) and Frame (one of the leading providers of cloud-based software, recently acquired by Nutanix).

Find more information about Serbian startup ecosystem at Startup Genome report here.

EURAXESS Startup Hub

Meet the EURAXESS Startup Hub

The EURAXESS Startup Hub is a networked program of support to sci entrepreneurs, setup by the research and funding organizations from 12 countries, namely Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, Estonia, Israel, Luxembourg, Montenegro, Switzerland, Moldova, Bulgaria, Greece, North Macedonia and Serbia, with participation of tens of external stakeholders, the prominent actors in national startup ecosystems of the above countries.

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EURAXESS Startup Hub Serbia

Our activities

We are focused to promoting the novel career paths to early-stage researchers and facilitating industry-academia collaboration through different training and networking schemes.

Early stage startup training and promotion activities include promotion of startup careers for first-year students, practical summer schools for third-year students from the different faculties and academic course for master students.
Networking activities include regional and international schemes in which young entrepreneurs meet with their colleagues and learn about startup culture in other countries.
Reverse innovation activities are technology meet-ups of industry with academia where practical problems find their solutions in advanced application of Artificial Intelligence, Computer Integrated Manufacturing and other technologies.

EURAXESS Startup Tour

Our flagship project is the series of three study visits for R1 or R2 researchers who already embarked in the startup entrepreneurship waters to the lively capitals of three startup nations: Israel, Estonia and Luxembourg. The tour will help aspiring sci-entrepreneurs to learn directly from the renown experts and mentors about the challenges and opportunities of the novel careers for researchers and to get in touch with international startup markets and cultures. The tour is organized by IP&D (Israel), University of Luxembourg, Estonian Research Council and MEF, and it will take place in June and July 2022 by welcoming researchers from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cyprus, Estonia, Israel, Luxembourg, Montenegro, and Serbia.

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Academic course: Startup entrepreneurship

In the academic year 2021/22, we implemented an academic course on Startup entrepreneurship for the first time. It is an accredited electoral course for master students of the MEF’s Engineering Management master program. For 15 weeks, among other topics, students learn about:

key concepts related to startups (lean startup concepts, development and financing stages, Agile and DevOps culture),
how to conceptualize the product (product-market fit, Minimum Viable Product, value hypotheses, business models, value delivery, scientific method),
how to setup a project (logical framework matrix, project templates, financial management, Gantt charts),
how to scale up (growth hypotheses, Technology Readiness Levels, engaging resources),
how to define a market (segmentation frameworks, user stories, customer journeys)

Summer school for tech entrepreneurship

The school is one month long, lecture and practical workshop-packed venue for students at University of Niš with entrepreneurship career aspirations (typically, 20 students per school). It is organized by MEF (last in July 2019), Faculty of Electronics, Faculty of Economics and Startup Centre Niš, but it also engages speakers from the industry, including top managers, tech experts, consultants, successful startup founders and representatives from the public companies. The topics of the last edition were lean startup concepts, project management (kanban), Python programming, data structures and software architectures, use of creative technologies in entrepreneurship and AI technologies.

Artificial Intelligence Day

The first Artificial Intelligence Day event was organized in April 2019 by MEF in collaboration with leading AI companies in the region, Faculty of Electronics and NiCAT Cluster of Advanced Technologies. The event gathered more than 50 industry representatives and academic researchers to present the regional potential in development of products and services based on Artificial Intelligence technology, aiming at consolidating the future local community of knowledge, based on academia/industry synergies and promoting the opportunities for local collaborations.

CIM Seminar series

MEF organized 6 seminars on advanced industrial technologies, each with the different focal topic. The event is venue for industrial representatives and academic researchers, to discuss on the industrial challenges and opportunities to addressed them, offered by the latest scientific achievements. The last event was organized in May 2019 and it focused on Industry 4.0 trend which encloses the application of novel technologies, such as Cyber Physical Systems, Internet of Things, Cloud Computing, Cognitive Computing, Augmented Reality and others, in manufacturing enterprises.

Guest lectures for first-year students on entrepreneurial careers

MEF regularly and continuously invites industrial leaders to take part in lectures with inspirational talks related to entrepreneurial career paths. Some of the most popular lectures in the past were:

The presentation on entrepreneurship career, title “My place in a brave new world” is held by Goran Mladenović (last in January 2022) – Director of NiCAT cluster, one of the leading tech business associations in the country, founder of ITG Consulting with 20 years of experience in managerial and expert positions in different industries.
“Startup entrepreneurship” talk addresses startup culture from the perspective of Eric Reid’s Lean Startup approach. It is regularly held (last in November 2020) by Branko Krsmanović, renown serial entrepreneur and business mentor and consultant.

YUINFO 2022 Round table: From PhD to successful startup

We organized a round table “From PhD to successful startup” in March 2022, in Kopaonik winter resort, in scope of the 28th edition of one of the most popular IT scientific conferences in Serbia - YUINFO 2022. It gathered serial entrepreneurs, academic researchers, representatives from industries and policy makers with objective to uncover the roadmap from PhD program to a successful startup. Some of the key topics of the round table were impact of mentorship, entrepreneurial support infrastructures in universities, evaluation systems, industrial PhDs, reverse innovation and development of entrepreneurial and startup culture in academia.