UV's Startups Mentorship Program starting this week

The Unicamp Ventures’ Mentorship Program 2011 (official website, in Portuguese) was officially launched this week and the mentors and startups are already scheduling their first meetings. The opening session last Monday at Unicamp with speeches of Fabricio Bloisi (founder/CEO of Movile and the leader of the program), Roberto Lotufo (director of Inova Unicamp), Alexandre Neves (Kaizen) and Beatriz Florence (Inova Unicamp), who explained the structure of the whole program.

In 2011, the program will help 35 startups, supported by 35 mentors and Inova Unicamp (the Innovation Agency of Unicamp, the University of Campinas). Among these startups, 19 are new attendees and 16 joined the program in its first edition in 2010 and decided to continue this year. According to Beatriz Florence, who is coordinating this initiative at Inova’s perspective, “it’s a one year program with mentoring meetings each 2 or 3 months, but if there is an agreement between both parts, the mentoring can be extended for another year as happened with all the companies who attended the 2010 edition”.

The program is stimulating the use of LEAN Startup and Business Model Canvas methodologies to increase the startups’ chances of success and is not restricted to Campinas’ startups, including even a company from another state. Among the companies attending the 2011 edition for the very first time, 11 are from Campinas, 2 from São Paulo, 2 from Jundiaí and 1 from Curitiba, Belo Horizonte and Elias Fausto.

“We’ve got several lessons learned from the first edition and we’ve made some improvements in the program this year. For example, there was just a little interaction among the companies last year. For 2011, the plans are that the companies should attend the Innoveur Meetups and 2 or 3 of them present their pitches during these monthly networking events”, says Beatriz. Another difference this year is that all the meetings will have a report, to improve the follow up in a more structured format.

The organizers and startups are really excited about the program and the impact of the last improvements.

Good luck for attendees, mentors and organizers of this program!