“Will your idea fly?” – the theme of the  Idea assessment workshop   in Riga

We are at the beginning of 2022 and our team is full of energy and desire to keep working on “GirlPower” project so that you, dear girls, could become successful entrepreneurs. However, we would also like to look back at the previous year for a simple reason: just before Christmas we conducted an idea assessment workshop “Will your idea fly?”. The event took place in Riga and gathered together 30 young ladies studying at three secondary schools. It was a truly exciting day!

The event started with ice-breaking activities and business simulation tasks to let everybody warm up, feel comfortable and get acquainted with each other. Afterwards, presentations of two knowledgeable speakers followed. Diana Lopeta, the Head of the Central Region at the Development Finance Institution “ALTUM”, spoke about her professional experience in evaluation of business ideas and highlighted factors that must be paid attention to when considering launching a business: idea viability, existence of a strong team, personal traits, competences and reputation of an entrepreneur, as well as ambition and readiness to enter international markets. Jelena Sterhova, a Senior Specialist at the Latvia University of Life Sciences and Technologies, gave examples of some crazy ideas that generated profit against all odds, presented 9 main criteria for business idea assessment and shared opinions of well-known business gurus, such as Robert Kiyosaki.

As a next step, the girls had a challenging assignment in teams: select a business idea, which was a novelty to the Latvian market, assess it based on the information received during the day and develop it further. Idea presentations were evaluated by a serial entrepreneur Marina Potjomkina, who has been running own company for more than 10 years. In the middle of this activity, the participants played a game “Two sides of the same coin”, which clearly showed that every situation has both positive and negative characteristics. Thus, any kind of feedback is a treasure that creates an opportunity for improvement. Just be brave!

We sincerely thank everyone who took part in the event and made it great: girls, teachers, speakers and experts! See you soon again!