The Incubated Coffee/Incubated Tea is an open event organized by Timişoara Software Business Incubator, dedicated to local community of start-ups and individuals interested in IT entrepreneurship and social media. Representatives of incubated and non-incubated start-ups and more established SMEs, freelancers, students or faculty members are attending the informal events in order to participate in discussions on current issues affecting the IT sector, new technical or business developments, their own or other teams' projects, or to jointly define future events and common projects of the Timişoara IT sector.

After an initial start in November 2009 as a weekly Thursday early morning (8.30-10.00am) event with about 10 attendants known as Incubated Coffee, answering to the participants requests for a more convenient format, the event has found its current identity as Incubated Tea, a bimonthly, Tuesday evening meetup with an average attendance rate of 20-25. During the about 10 editions that took place since November 2009, the event's program formed a stable structure including short presentations delivered by key speakers providing the starting points for open space discussions.

Debating IT innovations

The early March Incubated Tea edition was outstanding as it brought into debate the ways the participating individuals and the organizations they represent could play a more active role in the development of the IT SME sector.

The main conclusions extracted were that acting as a local network

... the participants will be involved in the development of local IT entrepreneurship

• by supporting the student organizations' current and future projects in the field,
• by promoting local IT entrepreneurial success stories,
• through establishing a local mentorship and leadership board to serve in the start-ups' benefit,
• through facilitating the establishment of an early stage investment,
• through supporting the organization in Timişoara of national or euro-regional IT events (conferences, trainings, fairs),
• and by facilitating the participation of local IT start-ups to the activities of international projects and networks;
  

... participants will support the development of the relevance and the effectiveness of the local on-line community;
 
... participants will contribute to the increase of the IT instruments adoption rate in the business and public sectors.
 
Within this ambitious plan, Timişoara Software Business Incubator is assuming a hub position and serves as a support center for the network. The Incubated Coffee & Incubated Tea events are promoted outside the incubator mainly via social networking such as Twitter. This approach leads from time to time to surprising special guests, like Gabriela Avram, lecturer in Digital Media at Limerick University (Ireland) who happened to be in Timişoara at one of the Incubated Coffee editions date and greatly contributed to the content and the atmosphere of that specific event.
 
Following the development of the concept, Incubated Coffee & Incubated Tea also has attracted the attention of leading organizations of the IT sector, including ARIES-TM, the Romanian Association of Electronics and Software Industries. If you are active in the IT and/or incubation and innovation field and it happens that you visit Timişoara on a Thursday evening, don't forget that you might join us for a cup of coffee or tea!