Incubation and Mentoring comes in different shapes and sizes

An article by Jim Sims, Lead Expert for the BluAct Transfer Network

Across the whole of Europe, cities are wrestling with the challenge of how best to support innovative entrepreneurs to start up and grow their businesses.

Business Plan competitions are just one way of generating new business ideas within a city and supporting the entrepreneurs to start-up in business.

For port cities, or cities with a strong heritage in the marine and maritime economy, the opportunity exists to organise a Blue Growth Entrepreneurship Competition - a specialised Business Plan Competition which seeks to generate new business ideas linked to the Marine and Maritime economy.

One such initiative, established to support entrepreneurship and innovation in the blue economy is Piraeus’ Blue Growth Initiative, an entrepreneurship competition that offers incubation services to local businesses boosting innovation and job creation.

Through the recent support of the Urbact Programme, the city of Piraeus has also been supported to transfer their good practice in Blue Growth Entrepreneurship to six other cities across Europe.

However, the differences in the support being offered to entrepreneurs is noticeable and the participating cities have adapted their competition structure to suit the needs of their local economies and their local entrepreneurs.

Read on to find out more ……

The BluAct Transfer Network

BluAct is a Transfer network of 7 European port cities including Piraeus, Mataro, Ostend, Galati, Matosinhos, Burgas and Salerno aiming to share good practices in Blue Economy entrepreneurship.

The City of Piraeus has developed the good practice, which is now in its sixth year of operation. The transferring cities are able to adapt the Piraeus Good Practice to suit their particular economic conditions and circumstance.

Not one size fits all …

The BluAct Transfer Network operates in an incredibly diverse set of cities. Some – like Galati, in Romania, and Burgas, in Bulgaria, are in less developed regions of Europe, where the natural levels of entrepreneurship are quite low in comparison to some of the more developed regions.

In these cities, the partners involved have had to use hackathons to generate ideas for their business plan competitions.  One particular characteristic of cities that have adapted the competition by organising hackathons is that they generally generate a higher number of entries from ‘early stage’ entrepreneurs than more developed regions, which can simply use an open call, or the offer of prize money, to attract more ‘market ready’ entrepreneurs to apply to their competitions.

In many cases, these ‘early stage’ entrepreneurs need more help in getting their business ideas honed and developed – needing to draw on a stronger pre-incubation programme (involving business planning, financial planning, skills development and business modelling).

This is in contrast to the competitions being run in more developed regions, with more ‘market ready’ entrepreneurs, which could focus more on delivering a classical incubation programme (comprised of a property solution, with a mentoring and coaching component). 

This is something that both Galati and Burgas have recognised, as their offer to winners of the hackathons comprised both a pre-incubation and classical incubation component.

The advantage for any city that offers both a pre-incubation programme and a classical incubation programme is that they maximise their chances of appealing to a broad range of entrepreneurs, all of whom might be at different stages in the development of their ideas.

Whichever model a city opts for, mentoring and coaching is something that is consistent across both models, but with differing inputs dependent on the needs and ‘maturity’ of the business.

More information

To find out more about the BluAct Network, visit bluact.eu/