The Free Zone is a system of creativity and prototyping designed for the internal community
Photos: Bruno Todeschini – Ascom/PUCRS
Free Zone, the university’s new division, has been designed to be an open system of creativity and prototyping for entrepreneurs to roll up their sleeves and formulate concepts. Designed by the Institute for Research and Development (Ideia) in partnership with the Raiar Incubator, a company conceived for the development of startups at PUCRS, Free Zone will be devoted to the prototyping of ideas and concepts, and its users will have free access to several pieces of equipment of different sizes in the areas of mechanics, electronics and scale modeling, including 3D printers, laser cutter, saws, software for 3D modeling of projects and design, testing tools and software, upon reservation. Free Zone opened its doors for PUCRS students, professors and researchers as well as Tecnopuc’s and Raiar’s companies on Apr 10, at Ideia, building 94 of Tecnopuc. If you want to check it out, please make a reservation on www.pucrs.br/ideia. It will be open from 8 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. and from 1:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.
Raiar’s Strategic Advisor and Business School Professor Kellen Fraga says that the project will be an assisting tool in the professional development of entrepreneurs by employing a learn-by-doing approach. “Prototyping will allow us to build things and make mistakes, check out the wrongs and change the strategy or replace product with low cost elements. This means the community will be able to build real projects that can be quickly re-adjusted”, says she.
Ana Cecília Bisso Nunes, Idear’s academic coordinator and School of Humanities Professor, claims that Free Zone is another important element in the pathway of entrepreneurship and innovation the University is treading, which already features Idear, Raiar as well as other projects. “Encouraging entrepreneurship during the undergraduate studies is essential these days. And entrepreneurship means more than setting up businesses, it is a wide variety of competences geared towards the training of individuals capable of putting their ideas into practice in order to make a difference in the world.” In order to make this happen, Ana Cecília states that testing, experimenting and challenging are necessary. “Free Zone will allow and encourage our students to build, test and materialize their ideas, in a collaborative area relying on all necessary resources to make an idea into a product, one of the challenges everyone wishes to face”, says she.
Ideia’s director, Professor Carlos Nelson dos Reis, asserts that this is an alternative to aggregate value to the university’s existing schools and an additional structure for the Science and Technology Park’s managers. No technical staff will be available at Free Zone, so users will use the equipment on their own. For more complex products or products requiring specialized tools, it might be sent to the laboratories at Idea.
