Demola
Demola was founded in 2008 in Tampere, Finland, as part of Nokia, and has been a separate company since 2011 as Demola Global. To date, Demola’s project activities have involved over 18 countries, more than 50 partner universities and over 15,000 students. In the Czech Republic, Demola is being developed from the summer semester of the academic year 2023/2024.
How Demola works
Based on consultations between Finnish experts and partner companies operating in the Czech Republic, future-oriented innovative topics and chalenges are developed. Students individually contribute to them. The resulting teams are both multidisciplinary, composed of students from different universities and disciplines, and international, including both Czech and foreign students. Communication is therefore mainly in English.
Work on the projects takes 10-12 weeks to complete, with three milestones:
- kick-off – team members get to know each other, detailed information about the process, teamwork begins
- mid-term – presentation of partial results, feedback, validation
- final pitch fair – presentation of results to visitors, rich feedback, planning next steps (e.g., follow-up within PointOne)
- in the meantime, teams work with support and mentoring from Czech and Finnish facilitators
The cooperation with Point One
Demola allows entrepreneurial students to choose from a wide and varied range of topics and work on the topic in a guided way within the team. The result of this work can then become a project or an idea that the student or the whole team comes up with in the first phase of incubation at Point One.
Objectives of Demola activities
- Encourage student entrepreneurship.
- reduce the fear of risk-taking and mistakes.
- help students build a wide network of contacts.
- enable intensive meetings between Czech and foreign students.
- teach students to speak with colleagues from other disciplines in a “normal human” language.
- provide an experience of work whose correct outcome is not predetermined.
- And much more