Sailing through the summer with EIT Jumpstarter

90 start-ups out of 120 has been already chosen for the next phase of the 2020 EIT Jumpstarter programme. The teams coming from Central, Eastern and Southern Europe were selected to join the local training.

Summer holidays are around the corner – 90 start-up teams out of the 120 entering the EIT Jumpstarter programme have been selected to the local training. The start-ups, coming predominantly from Central, Eastern and Southern Europe, are working on providing solutions of societal challenges across six domains: healthcare, agri-food, raw materials, energy, urban mobility, and manufacturing. After being trained in online bootcamps sessions, these teams know what market segmentation and customer value proposition is, they have been guided by expert mentors to formulate their deal, competitive advantage and impact on the European society.

In the summer heat, they need to cool down their expectations and validate the key assumptions in their business model. This knowledge is essential for the next steps of business planning, which is exactly the aim of the Joint training. Further training will be held locally in 18 cities across Europe in September, where the teams will have a chance to immerse in the local start-up ecosystem of their home country, meet incubators, fellow start-ups and get connected to the investor networks later on. The six EIT Communities designing the EIT Jumpstarter programme wish to provide all opportunities for the best teams to get connected and grow.

Exciting September is almost here!

The teams will enter the September training with a better idea about their customers’ needs and will be better prepared to refine their business model, define their position in the value chain they are targeting, align their sales strategy and define their roadmap until market-entry. It is not an easy and straightforward task for teams composed of scientists.

While some of the teams have an entrepreneur on board, others completely lack these skills and face the uncomfortable situation of crunching the numbers, struggling with projections, and working with assumptions, when all they have been done previously was relying on exact research data. In order to ease the pressure on those teams, EIT Jumpstarter partnered with Commercialization Reactor, a Latvian accelerator, to provide them a curated opportunity to meet fellow entrepreneurs who are looking for deep tech projects where they can add their expertise. During the bootcamps, we worked closely with the start-up teams, analysed their technology and team, and offered this opportunity to those whose skill set complemented with entrepreneurial skills could be more effective in bringing their innovation to the market.

“I have worked with the Healthcare teams in the past four years. A main lesson learnt is business skills development for scientists is not equals to having an entrepreneur on board, but definitely results in understanding each other better. It is imperative to define the competences within the team and understand that successful commercialization is an enduring process and result of a teamwork; no one is a superhero alone. Therefore, we are constantly assessing the needs of our start-up-teams and looking for cooperation with European and national organizations to contribute to the development of our teams”, says Dóra Marosvölgyi, EIT Jumpstarter Programme Manager and Healthcare start-up mentor.

All these efforts will be harvested during the Jumpstarter Grand Final, an open event, where the best six start-ups from each domain will present their business to the network of the EIT Communities, and perhaps in front of their next potential customer, partner or test lab.

About EIT Jumpstarter

EIT Jumpstarter is an award-winning entrepreneurial training programme specifically designed to deep tech scientific teams aiming to commercialize their innovative projects, guiding them to jumpstarting their business. The programme consists in collaboration of six knowledge and innovation communities of the European Institution of Innovation and Technology (EIT): EIT Health, EIT Food, EIT RawMaterials, EIT InnoEnergy, EIT Urban Mobility and EIT Manufacturing. Their goal is to support innovations throughout their paths to commercialization, create new ventures and contribute to increasing the competitiveness of the EU.