Since 2011
Our Story
Mindspace began with a simple question: how can student ideas move beyond theory and into the real world? What followed was a student-led effort to create entrepreneurial culture inside the Greek university, build communities across cities, and open direct paths to international innovation ecosystems.
San Francisco
The November 2025 Mindspace Trip to San Francisco showed how far the original idea had travelled: from trying to make students more entrepreneurial inside one university, to creating direct, high-level exposure to one of the world's most important innovation ecosystems.
Leading an Erasmus+ project across Greece, Spain, and Italy
Mindspace coordinated Young & Smart, an Erasmus+ project bringing together partners in Spain (Neotalentway, Granada) and Italy (Saffex, Rome). The project focused on entrepreneurship education for young people aged 16–25 with fewer opportunities, and on equipping their educators with new digital and emotional-intelligence tools to teach it. The main result was Skillbox "Entrepreneurship 101", an open educational platform combining a good practices guide, thematic training units, and short training-pill videos, together with six research articles ranging from gamification and gender perspectives in entrepreneurship to the circular economy and personal branding.
Read articleTHI Venture Impact Awards
In 2021, Mindspace won a $25,000 award through the Venture Impact Awards. The awards are run by The Hellenic Initiative, a global nonprofit that mobilizes the Greek diaspora and Philhellene community to support sustainable recovery and long-term growth in Greece.
From chapters to a wider network
By this stage, Mindspace had expanded into a broader chapter-based community that reached beyond Athens and, through the AEIF phase, beyond Greece as well. The effort had evolved from one initiative into a more scalable model for entrepreneurial community-building.
AEIF grant winner
In 2019, Mindspace won the U.S. Department of State Alumni Engagement Innovation Fund. The project, Youth entrepreneurship connecting the Balkans, supported regional expansion and a broader cross-border chapter model.
Silicon Valley and the rise of the Trip
By 2018, Mindspace had evolved to the point of taking Greek students to the United States. eKathimerini described participants visiting MIT, Harvard, and Stanford, meeting investors, accelerators, incubators, and founders, and visiting companies such as Google, edX, Facebook, and Netflix. This phase turned the original Mindspace mission into direct international exposure to the innovation ecosystem.
Part of Athens' startup story
In 2018, The Guardian included Mindspace in its feature on Athens' startup scene, describing it as one of the efforts helping students and young graduates transfer their skills and knowledge into entrepreneurship. The same article noted that the 2017 Mindspace Challenge led to five new companies and 30 jobs.
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Team of the Year
In 2018, Mindspace received a Team of the Year award through the nomination of its Patras chapter at a regional event in the Peloponnese. The award reflected how far the initiative had grown from its early student roots into a broader network with local visibility.
IVLP Fellowship
In 2017, Mindspace founder Dimitris Messinis was invited to attend the U.S. Department of State's International Visitor Leadership Program on Social and Economic Entrepreneurship for Young Leaders, adding a strong international leadership dimension to the story.
Discussion with Ambassador Pyatt
A 2017 discussion with U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt and winners of MITEF and Mindspace Challenge reflected the growing visibility of the initiative and its place within entrepreneurship-focused U.S.–Greece collaboration.
Mindspace Challenge expands across Greece
With support connected to the U.S. Embassy in Athens, Mindspace Challenge brought training in presentation skills and business planning to selected student teams in multiple cities, while the top teams earned the chance to travel to the United States. This was the phase in which Mindspace moved decisively from community-building into structured national programming.
Public recognition of a different approach
In 2017, Kathimerini featured Mindspace in an article titled The Greek university, differently. The piece described Mindspace as more than a collaborative technology space: a symbol of changing mentality inside the Greek university, built around collaboration, entrepreneurship, and stronger links with the outside world.
Angelopoulos CGIU Fellowship
In 2016, Mindspace won the Angelopoulos Clinton Global Initiative University Fellowship. The fellowship included €10,000 to develop Mindspace and attendance at the CGIU conference in California, giving the initiative early international recognition and momentum.
Resistance became proof that Mindspace mattered
As Mindspace became more visible inside NTUA, it also became a target. The attack on the 2015 launch event, the spraying of the space, and later slogans against Mindspace reflected resistance from parts of the existing university system. In hindsight, that opposition also confirmed that Mindspace represented a real break from the status quo.
Patras and the first successful expansion outside Athens
What started as a message from Odysseas Lamtzidis in 2015 became the first Mindspace chapter outside Athens. By spring 2016, the Mindspace Meetup How To Start A Startup was already running simultaneously at Polytechnio, AUEB, and the University of Patras, showing that the model could travel across campuses. The successful Patras meetup became an early example of scale.
Launching the space
The official launch of the new Mindspace space inside Polytechnio marked a turning point: the initiative now had a visible physical home inside the university. It was a moment of momentum, ambition, and public visibility. That same event also revealed how controversial entrepreneurship still was in that environment, when extremist left student groups disrupted the program and the event could not continue normally.
A space of its own inside Polytechnio
As the team grew, having a dedicated space became a major priority. After a year of lobbying, a supporting booklet, and signatures from 50 professors, Mindspace received the keys to its space inside NTUA in August 2015. It was a major symbolic step for the initiative.
Stronger ecosystem ties
Supporting the first MIT Enterprise Forum annual conference in Greece helped deepen Mindspace's ecosystem links and gave the team experience in connecting student energy with established entrepreneurial organisations.
Engineering meets business
A key phase in 2014 brought together engineering students, entrepreneurship professors, and students from Athens University of Economics and Business. That helped shape Mindspace as a bridge between technical and business thinking, something that became central to its identity in the years that followed.
Building the first team
The first year focused on finding like-minded people across engineering, research, technology, and student life. Those early meetings laid the foundations of Mindspace as a student-led initiative built around entrepreneurship, curiosity, and community.
Turning a question into an initiative
By late 2012, that question had started to become a concrete initiative. Mindspace began with the ambition to help students become more entrepreneurial, connect ideas with action, and create a culture where implementation had a legitimate place inside university life.
Why Mindspace needed to happen
In 2011, entrepreneurship had almost no visible place inside the Greek public university environment. At Polytechnio, one of the country's leading engineering schools, entrepreneurial activity was minimal, and even the language around product-building felt difficult to introduce openly. That climate shaped the original motivation behind Mindspace.
The constant
What stays constant
Mindspace has changed shape over the years, while the core idea has remained steady: create experiences that help young people move from curiosity to action.