Creative and sustainable solutions at Entrepreneurship Day

Every year, Jönköping International Business School (JIBS) at Jönköping University (JU) organizes Entrepreneurship Day for first-year students. The event is part of a joint course in entrepreneurship, intended to let the students develop a sustainable product, construct their own stand and present their ideas to a jury.

On the morning of October 10, over 450 students, divided into 83 teams, set up and decorated their exhibition booths in the Campus Arena to showcase the products they had developed.

The teams' entries were judged by a jury called "the Dragon Team", consisting of teachers from the course. Two teams received prizes of SEK 1,000 each for the best pitch, value proposition, and innovativeness. The "Power Patch" team won with their hot patch product for pain relief, and the "Hydrobloom" team for their irrigation product for people on the go or on vacation.

Lovisa Boström, Jacob Johannesson, Kajsa Nyberg, Alice Strånge, Kajsa Teahan and Eric Ungh, are studying the Civilekonom and International Management programmes at JIBS. They have been working together on their business idea "UniMeet". It is an app that offers an environment where JU students can connect and form social groups via the JU login.

"We come from different cities in Sweden and are of different ages, but it has been really fun to work together on this project. It has been exciting to create a new venture. We wanted to fill a gap we saw with this app and offer a new opportunity for JU students to meet. The app is meant to be used to socialize regardless of program, year of study and even school at JU," says the team.

Most sustainable idea utilizes by-products

The Science Park was also involved in the event and acted as a jury to select the group that produced the most sustainable product. The prize for the winners was SEK 5,000 and the assessment took into account the sustainability perspective, presentation, stand and target group analysis. The winner was the project "Kaffeglans".

"It feels great to win the prize for the best sustainable business idea. There were a lot of good ideas, so it still feels a bit unreal that we actually won," says Sergio Vallés, one of the team members.

Malin Mildton, who is also part of the same team, explains how they came up with the idea:

"We were thinking about things that get wasted a lot and it turned out that coffee grounds are one of those things. So we did some research and found that coffee grounds have a natural cleaning effect and were often used before modern cleaning sprays came on the market. We wanted to make dishwashing detergent because it's expensive, and we wanted to make it suitable for smaller dormitories. The sustainability aspect was very important because the dishwashing detergent market in Sweden is very competitive. We wanted to emphasize that this is the only waste-free product on the market," says Malin Mildton.