Any idea is worth something, and ideas in general can come from anywhere. This is demonstrated by a group of high-school students from Topliţa, a locality with no more than 14,000 inhabitants. The students enrolled and eventually walked away with the grand prize in a competition organized by the Junior Achievement (JA) Romania NGO and dedicated to initiative driven youngsters from the country. Under the slogan "invest in education", the organization has set out to bring together young talented and innovative people, to offer them the opportunity of working together to develop a product, or idea and then to discuss it with entrepreneurs and investors. Through such interactions, JA Romania aims to develop a prolific generation of professionals and entrepreneurs.
Moreover, through the above mentioned competition, JA hoped to expose these young ideas to experienced business people, precisely so that they could finance them. In the end, although students from many major cities and high-schools took part in the contest, the winners came all the way from Topliţa, whose proposal was as simple and as useful as possible. Basically, they developed a patch incorporated with a GPS receiver. This patch can then be applied either to objects or even to people, and is extremely effective in monitoring children or people with diseases such as Alzheimer's, as well as household items that can easily get lost. The device can be controlled through a mobile app, thus making it accessible to anyone.
By winning the grand prize, the team behind this product will have the opportunity to represent Romania at the JA European Company of the Year in Brussels, Belgium in July 2017. However, the true gain for these young people was the validation of the idea they have developed, its popularization and possibly its financing, since it is hard to believe that potential investors will not take advantage of this opportunity.
Sources:
Claudiu Bolcu
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