On the Cutting Edge of Science & Technology: The 2015 MIT Enterprise Forum’s StartSmart Conference at DEREE

The American College of Greece was honored to host StartSmart, the one-day conference on entrepreneurship by the MIT Enterprise Forum. The aim of the event is to inspire, connect, coach, and inform technology entrepreneurs on tools and techniques that can help their venture succeed faster and smarter.

StartSmart offers learning opportunities, based on the idea that successful entrepreneurship is an art that can be learned if it’s supported by a proven methodology. Organized and produced by MIT Enterprise Forum Greece, it strives to create a start-up business ecosystem and push for innovative ideas through the use of cutting edge tools.

The conference also included a competition, with first-place awarded to RTSafe, a company whose aim is to ensure cancer patient safety in radiation oncology, beginning with brain cancer. RTSafe offers the ability to develop personalized ‘avatars’ of patients’ heads, with a unique gel that mimics the brain tissue. This development has tremendous impact on the treatment effectiveness, as doctors can first test the treatment on the avatar.

The company is already up and running, and collaborating with medical institutions and hospitals such as John Hopkins, Lahey and Brainlab. Evangelos Pappas, founder and acting CEO, mentioned that another important aspect of the company is that they are “exporting the Greek know-how to such important institutions.

Second-place went to reportbrain Ltd, the world’s first knowledge engine, as opposed to the terabytes of raw information we receive at this point, and third place went to TOMOTECH, an innovative, cloud-based software service for the processing of 3 different MRI exams.

The event came to an end with a presentation by Antoinette Matthews, Executive Director of International Business Development of the MIT Technology Review¸ in which she outlined the top 10 biggest recent technological breakthroughs. An utterly fascinating countdown including concepts such as Virtual Reality, Nano-Architecture, DNA database communication, Supercharged Photosynthesis, Liquid Biopsies, and developing 3D clusters of brain neurons. Ms. Matthews closed by saying that “we need to talk about how we want to use these technologies, and not how we are going to be used by them.

The all-day event took place on October 24, and was open to stakeholders including entrepreneurs, thought leaders, subject matter experts, investors, industry, academia and members of the MIT community, who are helping to tackle the world’s biggest challenges.

For more information on the program, speakers and mission of StartSmart Greece 2015, please click here.