The Feel Touch team from Novoyavoriv Higher Vocational School in Lviv region represented Ukraine at the European Youth Entrepreneurship Festival and won the first prize for Ukraine among innovative business projects in 2024.
On 4 July, the Gen-E Youth Entrepreneurship Festival, organised annually by the international non-governmental organisation Junior Achievement Europe, ended in Catania, Sicily, Italy. The student-run companies that won national competitions competed against 40 other countries from across Europe. This year, more than 1,000 young entrepreneurs, along with their teachers and mentors, took part.
Feel Touch has developed an innovative device that helps people with disabilities to control gadgets. The students make the device for people with injured, paralysed and lost upper limbs. It allows them to use phones, televisions, tablets and laptops without a solid surface underneath. It is controlled by movement in space. The device has been successfully tested in rehabilitation centres and received positive feedback from users and doctors.
“It is a great honour and joy for us to win this competition. In a fairly short period of time, we managed to go from an idea to a fully functional working device. We appreciate that our product has been understood and supported, and we are proud of our team.”, – shared their impressions Feel Touch team members Khrystyna Paliukh, Liubov Sloboda, Oleksandr Tarasiuk, Roman Khomik and Veronika Khimyak.
“We are able to create and support teams that can compete with powerful European projects that have been created over many years. This gives us confidence for further active work.”,” said Taras Kryvuliak, a lecturer at Novoyavoriv VPU.
“The European Gen-E Entrepreneurship Competition allows young people to present their business projects at the international level, develop presentation skills, meet and exchange entrepreneurial experience with peers from other countries. Our team is extremely excited about the prize-winning place of the participants. This is an incredible positive experience that inspires us to prepare even better for the next Gen-E 2025 in Greece ,” said Vira Druhova, Programme Manager at JA Ukraine.
As a reminder, the students took the Company course as part of the Business Skills for Economic Growth initiative implemented by Junior Achievement Ukraine as part of the Vocational Education in Ukraine/Skills4Recovery programme implemented by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH on behalf of the German Federal Government. In May, the student team won the national competition “JA Company of the Year 2024” among 31 educational projects from 8 regions of Ukraine.