When the summer heat settles over Nicosia in early July, most people head for the shade. Six students from the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano headed instead for the lecture halls of European University Cyprus, where the Erasmus+ Blended Intensive Programme Summer School for Future Founders brought together Bachelor, Master and PhD students from across the SUNRISE alliance for one intense mission: turn an idea into a start-up in five days and pitch it to a jury.
The unibz delegation was remarkably diverse: Antonio, Chiara, Emma, Frederick, Mohamed and Simone came from both the Faculty of Economics and Management and the Faculty of Engineering. Accompanying the group academically was Prof. Guido Orzes of the Faculty of Engineering, who also joined the programme’s teaching line-up.
From ice-breaker to incubator
After a virtual kick-off in late June, the physical week in Nicosia opened on Monday with team-building activities, a briefing on the competition rules and a tour of the EUC campus and its labs, including the university’s start-up centre powered by Microsoft. The pace picked up immediately: a workshop on rapid prototyping with AI tools showed how early-stage ideas can become clickable mock-ups and testable concepts within hours, even without advanced technical skills, and by late afternoon the participants were already developing their own start-up ideas.
The following days blended lectures, founder testimonials and hands-on work. Cypriot entrepreneurs shared their journeys first-hand: the co-founder of a sustainable food-tech start-up spoke candidly about failures, pivots and the dos and don’ts of early-stage ventures, and a particular highlight was Maria Terzi, co-founder and CEO of the AI-driven mobile cybersecurity start-up Malloc, whose story of building her company stood out as the best-presented start-up journey of the week. Workshops on the Business Model Canvas, idea validation with real data (“Don’t guess, impress”) and start-up pitching completed the toolkit, while a visit to the IDEA Innovation Centre of the Bank of Cyprus and a session with the Gravity Ventures incubator offered a look inside Cyprus’s start-up ecosystem.
unibz was present not only among the participants but also on stage: on Thursday, Prof. Guido Orzes held the session “Rethinking Business Models for the Circular Economy”, challenging participants to redesign value propositions, resources and revenue models so that waste is reduced and materials stay in use, and to apply that circular thinking directly to their own start-up concepts.
Competition day
Friday belonged to the pitches. After a final rehearsal, each start-up idea had exactly five minutes in front of the judging panel: business idea, value proposition, target market and potential impact. The pitches condensed a full week of design thinking, mentoring and late-evening iterations into a start-up-style showdown, followed by the judges’ deliberation, the awarding of prizes and a closing networking cocktail with certificates for all participants.
The week was not all whiteboards and pitch decks. A guided evening walk led through the historic centre of Nicosia, the last divided capital in Europe, before a shared dinner in the old town where traditional live music soon had the whole group dancing and, in true Cypriot fashion, breaking plates.
A sunset boat tour from Agia Napa added the maritime highlight: sea caves along the coast, turtles surfacing next to the boat and a Mediterranean sunset off the stern. These informal hours rounded off the intensive programme and turned an international cohort into a close-knit group.
The Summer School was organised within SUNRISE (Smaller (Strategic) Universities Network for Regional Innovative and Sustainable Evolution), a European Universities alliance of nine small and medium-sized universities in non-metropolitan regions, co-funded by the European Union. The alliance strengthens the strategic role of smaller universities in their regions through joint teaching, mobility programmes and collaborative research; this Summer School, with teaching staff from almost every partner, was a showcase example.
For the six students from Bolzano, the takeaway was bigger than any single business model: an international network of like-minded future founders, a toolkit that stretches from AI prototyping to circular business design, and the confidence that a good idea, pitched well, can go a very long way in five days.
This report by the unibz participants of the SUNRISE BIP Summer School 2026: Antonio Jakova, Chiara Vidusso, Emma Tregnaghi, Frederick Marthol, Mohamed Mohamed and Simone Calloni.