Clear To Engage provides you with several instruments delivering external support to your business development. All of them are designed so as to give your startup as many inputs as possible by independent persons, either peers or professionals, so that you can make sure you’re on to something that is more likely to work in the market. Scroll down to learn more or quickly jump to each topic.
C2E actions include: dedicated mentorships, targeted to consolidating an “investor ready” business plan, consulting projects by independent teams of University students from MSc Economy courses, advanced technical or financial capstone projects by indepent teams of graduate MBAs or inter-faculty University teams, as well as partner services and custom reports with feedback by C2E for non-winning projects.
Each call has only some, specific, actions avaialable.
Make sure to check with the call page for details.
Mentoring
If you are selected for the mentorship, you’ll have the opportunity to collaborate with professionals that will leverage the contribution of IBAN to help you determine the best strategy to maximize your project’s chances to get funded by Business Angels. Projects in an advanced stage of development may exploit the mentorship opportunity to refine and wrap their business plan and engage directly with investors at the end of the process.
Mentorships will consist in one or more meetings (either individual or with the whole founding team). Agenda, locations and logistics will be defined taking into account the specific needs of the project, team and mentor. Part or all of the meetings may be help remotely via suitable collaboration tools. Entrepreneurs are expected to commit to a solid workload before meetings, in order to maximize their outcome and avoid time waste for yourselves and the mentors.
For each deadline, 3 full day mentorhips are available that will be assigned to projects through the following procedure: at the end of the selection process, a shortlist of the best candidate projects will be outlined. Depending on its development status, complexity and business potential, each single proposal will be assigned a portion of the available mentorhips, until the indicated total is reached, and at the sole discretion of the evaluation team. Thus, there is no predetermined number of winning projects gaining the mentorships.
Project Work
For each deadline, the best project will be accepted as a “Business Case” within graduate and undergraduate entrepreneurship courses held at partner Universities. You’ll have access to an independent team of 5-6 students that will work for a period of 1-2 months (depending on the specific course), under your supervision, on specific parts of your projects. You will have the opportunity to leverage their advising support to develop strategic parts of your business plan, such as market research, marketing plans, financial analysis, competition analysis, and so forth.
Each deadline allows access for only one winning startup as a Project Work within one of the indicated courses. Check the call page to know how each deadline is associated to the single course. Selection for project works and for mentorships are independent of each other: depending on your project’s development status either one of the two or both in parallel might be reasonable choices.
Capstone Projects
More advanced startups (i.e. startups with enough early validation about the product and the business model) will be given access to a different type of collaboration with student teams: the “Capstone Projects”.
While Project Works are about working on the Business Plan, Capstone Projects are about collaborating on either Product (prototype, features, packaging, design, UX) and/or Company Development (such as detailed financials, operations, logistics, internazionalization). Therefore, Capstone Projects have longer duration (typically 4 months and longer), more focused and professional objectives and can be based on outsourcing either technical or business tasks.
Capstone student teams are generally reserved to graduates and in most cases involve people with diverse backgrounds, typically from more than one Faculty.
Capstone Projects require that at least one preceeding C2E action is gone through, either a Project Work or a mentoring, in order to make sure that the work outsourced through the Capstone maximizes value for both the entrepreneur and the Capstone team. Unlike Project Works, Capstone Projects are not strictly educational for the students. Therefore in some cases, some sort of compensation for student teams, not necessarily in monetary terms, might be necessary. Since the Capstone teams for technical projects will have to go deep into technological details, specific IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) arrangements might be necessary to protect both the entrepreneur and the team itself. Check the call page for details about availability of Capstone Projects for each deadline, and specific arrangement required for setting up a Capstone.
Feedback Report
Starting from 2015 edition, after each call, Clear to Engage staff will take care that as many runner-up submissions as possible receive a detailed Feedback Report regarding their business proposal. This way, even startups that do not secure any other support action, can at least count on a detailed plan to improve their company project, regardless of their intention to re-submit to upcoming C2E calls. Content of these reports is, of course, company specific, but will surely include an assessment of the core assumptions of the business and to what extent these assumptions are/can be validated, possible strategies to conduct MVP experiments (Minimum Value Proposition), indication of key funnel metrics that should be carefully kept on the entrepreneur dashboard, and so forth.
Feedback Reports will be based on the documentation you send during the application, therefore this is yet another reason to submit the most complete and genuine information you possess, in order to avoid receiving feedback based on incomplete or misleading information.
Depending on the level of participation to each call, feedback reports might be issued to only the first 10-15 runner-ups. After the call results are issued, and in case you are not selected for any of the C2E supporting actions, you are more than welcome to solicitate a feedback report about your business. In case of an explicit request from you, C2E will surely force your inclusion into the list of the report recipients, as an aknowledgement of your commitment to your startup, which is the ultimate goal of C2E activities.
In any case, Feedback Reports will be issued not earlier than a month after each deadline, since priority is given to selected projects. So please be patient.
Partner Services
Clear to Engage is in partnerships also with service providers that are willing to support winning startups with their own services, that might range from cloud hosting to marketing services, where applicable. Usually, C2E partners provide their services without expenses for the startup and for a limited time. It is then up to the entrepreneurs to decide whether to interrupt the service or to make any arrangement with them.
Each call has specific third party support services available. Check the call page for details about a specific call.