1 Fikir 1 Karadeniz — Bronze Award

The competition

1 Fikir 1 Karadeniz is a regional idea and entrepreneurship competition held for Türkiye’s Black Sea region. Its scope is regional by design: entries come from the provinces of the region and are judged against each other rather than against a national field.

The result

The entry placed third and took the bronze award in 2024.

Why an entrepreneurship competition is worth entering

Competitions of this format generally ask for something an engineering contest does not. A technical jury wants to see that a thing works. An entrepreneurship jury wants to know who has the problem, how many of them there are, what they do about it today, and what would have to be true for a proposed answer to be adopted.

That is a different piece of work, and it is easy to underrate. A prototype can be defended with measurements. An idea has to be defended with reasoning about people, cost and adoption — evidence that is softer, slower to gather and harder to present honestly without overclaiming.

Preparing for a regional round also forces a useful constraint: the problem has to be recognisable to a jury that lives in the region. Abstract problems do not survive that filter. Specific, local ones do, and they tend to be the ones worth building for.