Help for Academic Institutions
The Business Catapult for Academic Programs
The Business Catapult (BC) provides standards-based assessment, social networking tools and web-based collaborative software (groupware) designed to accelerate and improve the advisory process and the overall idea formation to business development and capital formation processes for entrepreneurs.
How We Do This
Using a modularized and customizable profiling process, the BC provides students a variety of ways to learn more about entrepreneurship in general, and their business or business concept in specific. One of the primary modules for students is the Benchmark Survey™. This survey compares their answers to the answers given by successful companies. Upon completion entrepreneurs receive a 12-16 page report analyzing their responses.
For new business ideas, students upload their idea free form or in a formatted document of their choice. For business planning students, the next step would be to complete the Investor Summary. This form asks the entrepreneur to answer questions on their company that an investor might ask. Questions range from valuation, to use of funds to exit plans. Built in error checking, and self scoring checklists help the entrepreneur improve the overall quality of their plan. Next the student submits their plan, any supplemental information, financials; video pitches etc., for advisor review.
» View a video tutorial on how to take the Benchmark Survey
We Help Build Your Community
Our easy to use online collaboration tools make it a cinch to invite local business leaders, angel investors, VC’s, experienced wealth management experts, lawyers, and other business development professionals to become part of your community to review the student entrepreneur’s plan or idea. Though individual reviewers can directly connect with the student for those ‘teachable moments’ via email, phone and instant message, the BC also captures all comments made on an entrepreneurs file and delivers them to the student anonymously for review by them and their instructors.
Connecting Your Community
The BC has hundreds of professional associations, business incubators and Universities – our ‘BC Partners’ – all working with entrepreneurs in their groups on the Business Catapult’s web-based SaaS platform to mentor them in business development and to advise their them prior to seeking outside capital. We connect their entrepreneurs with the right investors and advisors at the right time for the right reasons.
Ready for funding
After completing your advisory sessions with your students, you can then refer them to our Open Deal Flow™, which has individual investors, ‘member managed’ investor groups, and ‘manager managed’ BC Pro™ subscribers (VC’s, private equity groups, investment banks, etc.) representing over a thousand investors seeking investments using BC. Investors are seeing their deals within a standardized framework that allows them to compare and contrast deals - and they’re also using the Business Catapult’s proprietary Deal Flow Management System™’ to collaboratively review them.