The Local Demo Day for DA-SPACE Open Innovation Lab at TU-Sofia was held on the 15-th of May 2018. The event joined together lab managers, current and future seekers and solvers and guests, including the Innovation Program Managers of the project prof. Lubomir Dimitrov, prof. Milka Vicheva, assoc. prof. Pancho Tomov, George Voutev of GIS, the managers of the TUS OIL assist. prof. Vladislav Ivanov and MEng Kiril Nikolov, as well as the General Manager of Hardware Design Ltd. Alen Pachov.

The seven teams of solvers, working on the challenges presented the results of their work – products with different level of maturity, starting from just a finished survey and analysis up to a fully operating prototype.

Some problems, which both seekers and solvers were facing in their joint work, were discussed during the meeting and new ideas were proposed to increase the efficiency of the Lab. A discussion was also held about the entrepreneurship training which is already running at the lab.

A jury including prof. Lubomir Dimitrov, assoc. prof. Pancho Tomov and assist. prof. Vladislav Ivanov had the not so difficult task of evaluating the achievements of the solvers which are the result of a 5-7 months of work. Some of the evaluation criteria were maturity of the product, level of difficulty, innovativeness and business potential and the obvious winner was the team working on the challenge "Self-calibrating multi material 3D printer" – Alexander Hristov and Radoslav Madzharov. The winning team, following the guidelines for conducting of a local Demo Day will have the opportunity to travel to Pula, Croatia, for the International Demo Day, which will be held in the period 27-28.06.2018.

Last but not least the guest professor from Novi Sad, Serbia – Prof. Dr. Vojin Senk held a short lecture on the topic "Starting high-tech environment out of necessity – case of the University of Novi Sad, Serbia".

The lecture was extremely interesting and useful because it showed the audience that there is always something positive to look after and how the combined work of a lot of people is always successful, even when is being done against all odds, and by doing that it becomes the foundation on which many other similar projects can build on.