Polaris is here: six months of specific mentoring to validate your business
Emprèn UAB is organising the first edition of the Polaris programme to validate projects from the university community. Polaris, aimed at innovative entrepreneurial projects from the UAB community, such as students, PTGAS, researchers and alumni (up to two years after completing their degree), seeks to deepen the knowledge and skills acquired to consolidate existing projects.
For this reason, it will only accept projects in which at least one of the members has previously completed training in entrepreneurship.
- An initial diagnosis, in which a coordinating mentor will be assigned to guide the teams, thoroughly assess the status of the project, and define a tailor-made work plan.
- A second implementation to validate your value proposition and improve the technical, economic, and commercial viability of the project. Each project will have up to 30 hours of mentoring with expert mentors specialising in different topics that the project needs to explore in depth to advance and mature.
- Finally, the closing stage, with a presentation to a committee that will assess whether the project has reached the necessary level of maturity and the possibility of accessing the Arquímedes Accelerator.
In addition, the programme includes complementary actions in all its phases to help validate projects: prototyping with the possibility of access to UAB OpenLabs (under specific conditions), patentability studies (under specific conditions), resource and funding searches, access to market research platforms, networking and co-creation actions, and workshops with experts.
The programme is expected to have a flexible duration, which may be extended to six months (or longer for projects that require it), and will have a hybrid format with online and face-to-face sessions in the coworking spaces of the Eureka building or the Employability Service or others open to different faculties.
With Polaris, at Emprèn UAB we want the talent of the university community to reach the market with solid proposals, enabling them to take the step towards creating start-ups with every possible guarantee of success.
To access Polaris, all interested individuals and projects can apply at any time. The selection process is ongoing, with quarterly meetings held by an external committee. The admission criteria for the project are as follows: team and commitment (50%), project maturity (10%), market potential and impact (25%), and viability and scalability (15%).