I had an amazing experience in Abuja toward the end of 2023 while attending Digital Nigeria, an event dedicated to harnessing frontier technologies for job creation and growth in the region. What impressed me the most was the younger generation’s thirst for education in technologies such as blockchain, actively seeking ways to learn more about it.
So I wondered, what’s the younger generation’s interest in learning about frontier technologies within Europe? What kind of education opportunities are they provided with? And what about education for government and enterprises?
To get a feel for European students’ interest in frontier tech, I spent some time with stakeholders and high school students from the “Innovators of Tomorrow” program in Poznan, Poland. This presentation has been designed to dissolve stereotypes about the tech industry and encourage students to enter the space by equipping them with knowledge and skills.
The opportunity presented itself during the Tech of Tomorrow Conference on March 19-20, 2025, an event organized by Dr. Agata Slater and Marcin Rzetecki, both members of the Polish Blockchain Association and advocates of the Innovators of Tomorrow program.
“This was a session that we held where we invited secondary school students to pitch their ideas that they had prepared throughout the Innovators of Tomorrow program,” shared Dr. Slater. “And this has been a huge success because it’s something new and different in a conference, where you invite fresh kids who are passionate about these topics, and you start building these capabilities from really, really bottom up.”
“We see there is so much energy and passion and creativity in these kids, and I think that’s injected a lot of energy and freshness and their energy radiated to the audience. So, that was really amazing,” Dr. Slater added.
Rzetecki has a unique perspective on Innovators of Tomorrow as he has a daughter in high school who is part of the program.
“I see every day that they are using the mobile phone, they learn a lot of about the technologies, they talk a lot of about the technologies, but they don’t have experience with the soft skills, with the presentation, to prepare the presentation, the art of selling, to presenting the project to the investor, for instance,” he explained.
Dorota Dublanka, President of Cyberium Foundation of the Polish National Clearing House, is also passionate about the program and has clearly built strong relationships with the students, as anyone who watched the session during Tech of Tomorrow saw.
“We are providing the workshops during the Innovators of Tomorrow,” Dublanka revealed.
“There were two of our specialist experts from our foundation; one was very important based on the soft skills—that’s collaboration, communication—but also how to go to the business, and the second one, it was really technology because we have a specialist from blockchain,” she said.
I had an opportunity to speak with a few students directly following their startup pitches on stage to get an idea of what they learned from the program.
“From the program, mainly I learned how we could use blockchain, Internet of Things, and AI technology to develop solutions to problems, specifically with things like finance. We’ve also learned team building skills and how we can improve our soft skills,” shared Marcel of Techni Schools Lublin & Co-Founder of GhostPay.
“I think most of the skills that are the most valuable for me are technological skills. I knew almost nothing about it, and right now, I can say I think I know a bit and also about the group work, how to do it the best, how to connect with my teammates and staff, and also the performances; it became really less stressful,” added Natasha of Secondary School of the EKOS Foundation in Swarzędz & Co-Founder of LILYSKIN.
The students were also happy to share details on what real-world problems their startups are tackling.
“What we are solving is a problem of privacy and how we could use crypto’s potential in everyday tasks like online shopping. Our project focuses on how we can keep privacy of users while they spend their money online,” explained Marcel.
“We have a skincare application, so it solves the problems of people who are unable to create their own skincare routine,” added Natasha.
“And we also talked about the Sephora kids issue—that our kids are using active ingredients and generally products that are age-inappropriate for them. So, our app would come in really helpful for those kids, for those people to generate a skincare routine…that is suited to their skin type, to their age, and everything,” she said.
Lena, also part of the LILYSKIN founding team, elaborated on the technology behind the scenes for their application.
“In our application, AI generates this personalized skincare routine that is suitable, customized for every user’s needs. And we also use blockchain to store the data, so it will be safer,” Lena shared.
Just like learning a new language, starting education at a young age is powerful, inspiring fresh ideas and diversity right from the start.
“They are like a sponge. They can learn a lot in a quite a short while. They don’t have any barriers, they don’t have any background, and it’s quite important even to start from … scratch,” shared Natalia Urbańska-Guss of Poznań CityLab, one of the program’s main partners.
“Even in kindergarten, you can teach kids to be entrepreneurs. From the small projects, step by step, they learn what … entrepreneurship is, how to do that, what their goals could be, and so on,” she said.
“I think that this engagement should be done from the beginning, from the primary school. We are losing a lot of talents, and these female talents and the primary school, as they are told, they are not good enough to be in technology,” added Dublanka.
“We are educating the parents [on] how to support the children and how it’s different to support the man and how it is different to support the girl because they have the different fears about how they are growing up, what they can do, and they have also the different information from their colleagues at school,” she said.
While there are numerous benefits to commencing frontier tech education at a young age, some of us have already missed the boat. Education initiatives targeting more seasoned professionals are also key to pushing frontier tech forward.
“I think we’re really lagging behind in this, particularly government and enterprise in … explaining to them the value of these frontier technologies and how they come together to form their tech stack of the future,” shared Alex Stein, Conference Director of the London Blockchain Conference.
“Education has to start all the way from the universities all the way through to being at conferences like London Blockchain Conference where we’re looking at the underlying technology and actually the value and business case for implementing those technologies in an enterprise or in a government,” he added.
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Becky Liggero Fontana
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