Fatih Isbecer

ITU, is a state university that has been founded in 1773 as the Imperial School of Naval Engineering of the Ottoman Empire. With a history stretching back over 240 years, ITU currently offers graduate and postgraduate education on a wide range of fields today. It has more than 30,000 full time students across five campuses located in Istanbul. The university employs around 1,130 faculty members, and 1,300 research assistants in 13 faculties and 6 research institutes. Times Higher Education has ranked ITU as the 165th university worldwide in 2014 and 8th university in BRICS & Emerging Economies in 2015. ITU has developed a range of entrepreneurship and innovation platforms for commercializing technology-based knowledge and for facilitating entrepreneurial ecosystem: ITU TEKNOKENT, established in 2002, is one of the largest technology parks of Turkey with its 100,000 square meters area, over 2,000 completed R&D projects, 160 companies with more than 5200 employees. ITU Teknokent generates $137M total income and $110M R&D exports in 2014. ITU CEKIRDEK is the most comprehensive and unique pre-incubator, incubator and accelerator of Turkey. With its own branded entrepreneurship competition, it attracts thousands of applications and awards seed capital, for example at TRY100,000, TRY50,000 and 2 x TRY25,000 to leading startups in 2014. ITU GINOVA Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation is established in 2012 by a group of faculty members from ITU Management Engineering Department. It aims to diffuse entrepreneurship culture among Istanbul Technical University (ITU) students and faculty; inspire and encourage ITU students and faculty towards creative thinking and innovation; to provide them with entrepreneurial skills and competences; as well as to conduct research on innovation and entrepreneurship to expand knowledge in these areas, with passion for innovation, courage, creativity and learning by doing.