Experiential learning: First-year student pitch their business ideas in front of entrepreneurs

December 19, 2019

At RIT Croatia, we are all committed to preparing our students for careers of their choice; and we start preparing them from Day 1! Experiential learning and applying everything you learn in classroom in real-life situations is embedded in the RIT Croatia student experience in all programs.

One great example of 'learning by doing' is Business 1 course (International Business program) that our students take in their first year. They learn about key functional areas of business, evaluating business opportunities and feasibility of business ideas. They come up with their own business ideas which they developed through the remainder of the course. The course culminates with their final exam with students presenting and pitching their fully developed ideas in front of a jury comprising of business professionals - entrepreneurs and start-up owners.

This year the big finale took place on December 12 in ZICER, Zagreb Innovation Center. More than 100 first-year students were pitching their ideas to a jury consisting of true startup experts and owners:

• Tana Zimmerman, RIT Croatia alumna, owner of bazzar.hr
• Scott Coleman, former RIT Croatia faculty member, co-founder and COO of TDA
• Marin Mrša, CEO and founder of Peekator
• Andrej Šarić, RIT Croatia faculty member, co-founder of ENUM
• Sabedin Rrahi, RIT Croatia alum, Publisher at Facebook / Amazon.com Associate, and
• In addition, the jury included our WMC student Matko Piškor, a DURA hackathon winner in April 2018

The atmosphere was amazing; the pitching consisted of two sessions and at the beginning of the each session, two startup owners from ZICER welcomed the students and "pitched" their stories, just to showcase to the students how it should look like.

Students were creative in their ideas that ranged from event management, various web / mobile applications, virtual reality applications to ideas such as exporting construction services to remote locations in Africa. Jury members had lots of questions and gave lots of positive feedback to the students.