Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1124848
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY maltatoday | SUNDAY • 2 JUNE 2019 16 THE main mission of the MI- TA Innovation Hub (MIH) is to cultivate the Maltese start- up ecosystem by organising events, workshops and pro- grammes targeted at incenti- vising tech entrepreneurship. Early this year the MIH in- troduced a new pilot start-up programme, branded Valida- tor. The purpose of the Valida- tor Programme, as the name suggests, is to help teams with a tech idea to answer impor- tant questions such as: Does my idea make business sense? What and whose problem does it solve? Is it feasible? Is there a market for it? How vi- able is it? What are the meth- odologies to assess the com- petitive landscape? In essence, test the business idea to assess if it is worth pursuing before going to the next stage: that of building a Minimum Viable Product, i.e. a basic prototype to use to get customer feedback and further optimise the product prior to launch. An analysis of over 500 ap- plications received for the YouStartIT accelerator since inception, has revealed that there are many good teams with good ideas for a tech business. However, very little effort is spent on validating it through thorough market research and analysis of the customer segment being tar- geted. The latter are skills that technical people generally do not possess unless they have already been through a start- up programme. After approximately one month of preparations, appli- cations for the Validator Pro- gramme opened during the last week of February. The programme was not in- tended to provide any funding to the teams, but to impart the skills and the right mind- set to adopt before kickstart- ing a start-up project. The best four teams who, in the opinion of the judging team, successfully validated their tech start-up project, would be automatically fast- New Validator start-up programme exceeds Five teams selected to join the rest of the YouStartIT cohort in September The programme, which was spread over five weeks, adopted a flipped classroom approach and embraced mostly Lean Start-up methodologies, together with other techniques designed to help size and analyse the market, ask the right questions, formulate a business model, and so on