Hackathons
Entrepreneurs all have one thing in common, ambition and competitiveness. That's where efforts should be made
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Young entrepreneurs have one major thing in common. They believe in their ideas, while being motivated and ambitious to further develop them. That´s where the "Senat of the future" should position itself.
Your current model has the perfect framework to develop competitions and provide an interesting environment for entrepreneurs, male and female. However as you mention a lack of awareness and a high entrance are keeping start ups at bay.
What you need to promote to gain traction for your network are the following:
- Your "Brand"
- Startups need to see how much they can benefit from your network
A competition in each of the 4 pillars you mentioned economy, ecology, education, health should be held to raise awareness. It can be said that by holding a competition with attractive prices this should be the logical consequence, however it is also important to bind these startups to you.
That's why the framework for the competition should be the following:
The competition has 2 stages.
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An online submission phase where every entrepreneurs submits a video pitch of his company/product. A jury per category than selects a certain number of startups out these companies.
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Each Startup gets matched with a large company out of your current network. For 2 months both of these collaborate to further develop the products and display use-case examples.
This way the entrepreneurs are more quickly integrated into the Senat. The prices should also be targeted to the wishes of the entrepreneurs namely, contracts for their products, partnerships or a certain amount of money/promotion through your network. Additionally I would suggest including memberships to the Senat according to the ranking ( 1. Place = Yearlong membership, 2. Place 8 Month etc..) I am sure you will come up with a system. This will get the startups to experience what the Senat can provide them with. In the second year of application you can then include previous winners to talk about their experiences.
To target female entrepreneurs specifically you could also add an additional award of female entrepreneur of each category with similar prizes.
I hope you liked the idea and may the competition begin..