Urban Mobility Incubator is a 9-week summer program of active individual work in teams and mentoring, followed by prototype deployment in Riga urban environment.
APPLY NOW
This project is funded by EIT Urban Mobility, an initiative of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), a body of the European Union.
As cities grow, the demand for mobility increases. Today urban mobility accounts for 40 % of all CO2 emissions of road transport and up to 70 % of other pollutants from transport within the European Union. By fostering innovation and transforming urban mobility, we can cut unnecessary costs, improve quality of life and contribute to achieving climate targets.
Getting your prototype from the lab to the city streets is often an unnecessarily complicated process that can take up to 18 months. Within this program, the City of Riga has committed to providing a green corridor and will deploy the prototypes for testing this summer. The program will also provide the participants with up to €5 000 for for prototyping and piloting.!
Together with the teams, we will set up personalized 9-week plans for each. So if you're a total beginner, we will provide you with a comprehensive development framework and mentoring, but if you're a seasoned entrepreneur, we will not make you sit through the intro to business canvas.
Often startups are expected to know what the city wants without an actual conversation with city representatives. We emphasize collaborative innovation, so dialogue with the City of Riga will be an integral part of the solution development. Moreover, the EIT Urban Mobility network will enable even wider access to many European cities.
The incubator will be a 9 week long summer program of active individual work and mentoring, followed by prototype deployment in the Riga urban environment. Each participant will have a personalized progress plan depending on their situation at the program start. Therefore, we are equally welcoming to completely new teams with high potential ideas as well as already established startups interested in deployment acceleration.
The program will offer hands-on workshops with supervisors on market research, client profile assessment, prototyping, marketing, etc., with up to 5,000 EUR financial support for each team's prototype development and deployment to build their solution on a real scale.
The Urban Mobility Incubator program is funded by EIT Urban Mobility and delivered by the innovation movement VEFRESH in partnership with the Riga City Council City Development Department and the Riga Technical University.
Making sure that your idea and value proposition is actually targeting real market needs
Researching competition, defining your edge and creating a profitable business model
Creating solution prototype under the guidance of mobility, IoT, AI and other tech experts
Deployment of the developed prototype for testing purposes by the City of Riga
Final event to share your progress and received feedback from investors and potencial clients
This project is co-funded by EIT Urban Mobility Regional Innovation Scheme (RIS) an initiative of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), a body of the European Union. EIT Urban Mobility acts to accelerate positive change on mobility to make urban spaces more liveable. Learn more: eiturbanmobility.eu.
We are open to beginner entrepreneurs with a passion and strong drive to succeed as well as to already established startups looking for that extra push to get their prototype deployed in real urban conditions. Our team selection is based on the following criteria:
Eligible candidates hold the following qualifications:
The program is free of charge.
.jpeg)
%20(1).png)
You will be required to fill out an application form that describes your idea and team setup. The applications will be accepted from April 12 to June 17. If necessary, we also might invite the applicants for interviews with the jury committee or organizer team.
Our primary focus are participants from the Baltic states, but we are ready to consider teams from elsewhere in the world if you are interested in registering your company in Latvia. For more information about how to do this and Startup visa, please check Magnetic Latvia portal.
The program will start late June and will finish in September. Soon after the final pitch night will be organized.
We will expect you to strongly commit to the development of your business strategy and technical prototype during the program time. We also expect the participants to engage with other teams, share constructive feedback and be open to various opinions.
No, as an incubation program we will not take your equity, but we will expect you to keep us updated about your future milestones and successes, as we need to monitor your progress over the following 2 years.