Good practice:

Start Cup Piemonte Valle d’Aosta

The Start Cup Competition is dedicated to people with an innovative entrepreneurial idea. It begins every year at the end of spring with its first phase: Ideas’ Competition. During this, candidates have to present a first description of their entrepreneurial idea and the most interesting ones win the support in writing their Business Plan, so to be prepared for the second phase. The second part of the competition is the Business Plans’ Competition, during which candidates have to present a whole business plan of their entrepreneurial project. These are then examined by a jury made of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who will create a short list of projects. The projects in the short list present themselves to the jury that will then decide the final ranking. The competition usually finishes at the end of summer. As a conclusion, there’s an Award Ceremony during which the best three projects win money prizes and the access to the PNI Competition. 4th 5th and 6th placed win the PNI access as well, and Special Prizes are given to other projects (Social Innovation, Equal Opportunities, and the special territorial prize awarded by Aosta Valley).

The amount of funding is about 150 k€ per year.

Every year we receive more than 200 business ideas from about 500 potential entrepreneurs. During the Start Cup process we transform the ideas in about 100 business plans. During the following year, about twenty of these business plans become start-ups establishing the company.

The problems the incubators had to face and solve during the years of activity have been:
-the creation of a methodology of scouting and communication’s strategy to collect entrepreneurial ideas
-a group of coaches to support entrepreneurial team in the transformation of the ideas in business plan

The above descripted experiences have been successfully shared in Italy, with Basilicata Region in 2017 and with Calabria Region in 2018.