Learnings from the Fall 2025 Prototyping Fund Showcase

Prototyping fund fall 2025: Experimenting and Building to Learn and Grow

On November 25^th, 2025, Nova SBE KPMG Gallery hosted once again the Fall 2025 Prototyping Fund Showcase. The Prototyping Fund, an initiative led by the DESIS Lab @ Nova SBE (within the ERA Chair in Social Innovation), in partnership with the Haddad Entrepreneurship Institute aims to support students’ ideas addressing social and environmental issues. It provides them funding (up to 600 euros in phase 1, and up to 1,500 euros in phase 2) to build hardware, software or service prototypes, and connects them with the resources, tools, and mentors they need to bring their ideas to life. 

This fall, 13 teams of students representing multiple Master’s at Nova SBE as well as some multidisciplinary collaborations between Nova students and other universities in Portugal and across Europe. Their projects ranged from designing a device to predict temperature break in medicine / food transport to developing an AI power mobile app providing digital self-therapy for jaw disorders (bruxism and TMJD), producing a biodegradable, non-toxic wood and paper adhesive or creating an e-learning platform providing accessible AI education content for teachers and professionals. Make sure to read the list provided below to learn about all the projects that cover a variety of domains: healthcare, education, inclusion and sustainability.

The Prototyping Fund is at its core about experimentation, learning and collaboration. We invite participants to think of prototypes as “questions embodied” and to think of the Prototyping Fund as a space to experiment, test their ideas (with users!), and to iterate. It was therefore inspiring to hear one member of VerdeWall tell us as he showed us the prototype his team built this semester: “Now we know how to build it, and we need to understand how it works.” Their next steps, he explained, were refining the prototype, but also figuring out how well it helped in cleaning the air (i.e. understand how it works).

“Learning and growth” was what the Plastnatur team mentioned as they reflected on their participation, which allowed them to build the first functional prototype of their Smart Bin. Agora team noted that participating to the second phase of the Prototyping Fund not only allowed them to experiment with a new version of their dispensers (based on users’ feedback) but most importantly, it forced them to think about who their users were and what was their value proposition. The team was excited to announce that they now were officially an organization: “It’s real; we are continuing”.

Last, it was great to see Ohana’s cabinet for shared equipment for students, fully built, filled with sport equipments and some games, and a functioning locking app. As the team is now looking to get feedback from students borrowing the shared equipment, we were happy to offer them to move the Ohana cabinet to the Konnect area so that they can continue their prototyping. Don’t forget to check it out next time you pass by the Konnect space.

Once again this year Prototyping Fund illustrates the value of experimentation, feedback and collaboration, and we are sure that the teams collected much more ideas to explore as visitors stopped by and interacted with them.

We want to give a particular big thank you to André Martins and the team at FabLab Lisboa who this year again has been supporting some of the teams. We also want to thank all the mentors from our DESIS Lab and beyond: Karine Sarkissian, Joana Milla Villas, Bianca Crivellini Eger, Diliana Funtarova, Bonnie Cheuk, Wayne Suiter Matamoros,Trent Hoy, and Francesco Cara.

Looking forward to seeing these projects evolving, supporting a few in our Prototyping Fund Phase 2 and of course, discovering new projects in the spring.

The DESIS Lab Team (Anne-Laure Fayard and Beatriz Bento)

Acknowledgement: The Prototyping Fund was supported by the ERA Chair in Social Innovation, which is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 951735