STARTUPV: DIFFERENT APPROACHES IN MENTORING AND TUTORSHIP FOR ENTREPRENEURS IN THE THREE STAGES OF A UNIVERSITY ENTREPRENEURIAL ECOSYSTEM

Abstract

Year after year, a crowd of students from the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), a polytechnic university in Valencia (Spain) with over 30,000 students, are encouraged to start their own business projects. Since 1992, IDEAS UPV, the Entrepreneurial service at UPV, has been mentoring entrepreneurs. Up till now, IDEAS UPV has helped in the generation of close to 1000 new businesses with a survival rate of over 60% in five years. In 2012, IDEAS UPV introduced new mentoring and tutorship activities for students by the creation of a business incubator within the university campus. StartUPV is currently a 5-year startup incubation programme and an entrepreneurial ecosystem with more than 300 startups and more than 50 million euros of overall private investment StartUPV programme is divided into three different stages: (i) STAND UP, in which startups define a business model and complete a validation process; (ii) START UP, in which startups achieve a targeted market share and build their company management team; and (iii) SCALE UP, in which startups achieve maturity and scale to other international markets. As university students and their startups face different needs in every step of the programme, different approaches for mentoring and tutorship are applied in every stage. For instance, a startup in the first stage is mentored in business modelling or market segmentation, while a scale up requires a more specific mentorship in dealing with corporates and venture capital. These different approaches are analysed in this work including the main findings of the 10 years of this programme.