University Executive Vice-President and CFO Dr. Leonidas Tzonis was one of 30 prominent businesspersons and educators invited by the Evros Chamber of Commerce for a three-day event (February 18-20) in Alexandroupoli to evaluate the proposals young entrepreneurs have been developing within the framework of the Chamber’s Entrepreneurship Support Structure (ESS).
As part of this program, Dr. Tzonis and his colleagues have been serving as mentors for nine potential start-up firms as the latter work to develop their ideas to the point where they are ready to seek funding. The Alexandroupoli review marked a critical stage in the process, since proposals that mentors evaluated as sufficiently mature and promising will now receive support from the Chamber, including office space at the Light Hub EVROS Chamber of Commerce Incubator, advice on creating the legal entity for their start-up, and, of course, continued access to mentors for consultation and advice.
As Dr. Tzonis points out, the Evros incubator project has been especially successful. More than 10 such incubators have been launched by Chambers of Commerce in Greece in recent years, but the Evros’s ESS is the first to be completing evaluating their first cohort of start-ups. He says much of this success is due to the Chamber’s able leadership and the work of Leonidas Skerletopoulos, the General Manager of Light Hub, and Petros Soukoulias, co-founder of SEEMS PC, who heads its Scientific Committee. But Dr. Tzonis says the project’s success also mirrors the region’s dynamism and growing strategic importance. “There’s been considerable foreign investment interest in Alexandroupoli in recent years from the US and elsewhere, as we see in the tenders recently submitted for a stake in the city’s Port Authority.”
Dr. Tzonis’s service as mentor for the Light Hub incubator inaugurates a period if broader cooperation between the University and the Evros Chamber of Commerce. In the framework of this partnership, the University has provided three full scholarships for eligible applicants for admission that the Chamber will nominate.
During Dr. Tzonis’s visit to Evros, he and his colleagues also had discussions with members of the Chamber’s Board of Directors and regional and local businesspersons and met with the Metropolitan Bishop of Alexandroupoli Anthimos and the Regional Vice-Governor, Dimitris Petrovits.
Image: Mentors discussing with the President of the Evros Chamber, Mr. Christodoulos Topsidis and the Regional Vice-Governor of Evros, Mr. Dimitris Petrovits.