Women in Innovation (2015 – Present)

The Women in Innovation Project is a project organized to improve the entrepreneurship competencies of women who say, “I have an idea”, and help them transform their efforts into qualified employment enterprises. At KADEM, we organize camps each year under the Women in Innovation project with the aim to encourage skilled and entrepreneurial women and help them implement their projects.

Training and experience-sharing sessions are provided to candidate entrepreneurs on the topics of entrepreneurship, marketing and commercialization by specialists in such fields for a two-week period.

IT Valley and TOBB (The Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges of Turkey) ETU (University of Economics and Technology) also participated in the project, which was initiated in 2015 in cooperation with the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) MARTEK and KADEM. In the 15-day entrepreneurship camps held each year, participants are provided with training under various topics, such as Entrepreneurship and the Start-Up Ecosystem, Start-Up Analysis and Technological Maturity, Intellectual Property Laws, Business Plan Development, Leadership in Entrepreneurship, Business Ideas Swot Analysis, Labor Laws, and Mentoring, and they have an opportunity to meet with mentors and investors.

Each year, all the participants are granted a certificate, while the owners of the five most successful projects are awarded TL 25,000 (provided that they become entitled for grant support within one year).

The number of women who applied for the project during the five-year project period is 1,586, and 144 women took entrepreneurship training. The women who presented their projects and became entitled to receive support from KADEM implemented their business ideas and achieved both national and international success.

By 2021, the Women in Innovation Project aims at providing more comprehensive content to a broader target group.