PROMETHEUS Entrepreneurship Acceleration Platform

PROMETHEUS Entrepreneurship Acceleration Platform is an academic accelerator of innovation and entrepreneurship ideas from the participating HEI’s students and staff while also assembling activities to develop and nurture business in the area of Digital transformation, Circular Economy and Sustainable Development. PROMETHEUS platform is accompanied by students and staff from all the participating HEI’s, mentors, angel investors, companies and organizations from all over the world, in order to promote the overall development, allow online mentoring from external experts and support the collaboration of team members from all HEI’s and beyond. 

Key features of the PROMETHEUS Entrepreneurship Acceleration Platform:

• The platform supports the collaboration of groups and individual students or researchers from different departments of the participating HEI’s or society.
• Emphasis is placed not only on awards, but on the systematic assistance and finding of resources for start-ups in the long run. Ideas can be submitted continuously, and outside of competitions.
• The platform gathers the needs of local businesses and organizations so that the start-ups respond to real needs (demand-driven entrepreneurship) and increase their contact with the market (market traction).
• The social impact of the proposed actions and ideas is analyzed, in accordance with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
• PROMETHEUS Entrepreneurship Acceleration Platform brings “young” entrepreneurs in touch with angel investors and financiers, at a very early stage.
• The platform enables crowdfunding capabilities.

The Entrepreneurship Acceleration Platform was launched in November 2021 and it has been  populated with students, startups and mentors ever since. Its objective is to connect students, researchers and research & development teams together with mentors, building overall the PROMETHEUS innovation ecosystem. The Platform was developed so as to provide more optimized user profiling, training and mentoring capabilities as well as operate in relation to PROMETHEUS project different modules.

Academic staff  from all HEI partners implement in their lectures the PROMETHEUS Entrepreneurship Acceleration Platform in combination to other PROMETHEUS project activities. In order to ensure correct completion, 2 lectures were made by professionals in the field of entrepreneurship who also provide mentoring to teams in their business ideas.

Many of the students managed to:

• register
• create their individual profiles
• assemble teams
• start uploading their business ideas

Teams had mentoring sessions with PROMETHEUS Mentors, and connecting to the ecosystem. The best ideas on Digital Innovation and Sustainable Development entered the PROMETHEUS International Competition and started connecting to the PROMETHEUS Network of Associated Partners.

The ability of the platform to provide students and organizations a common ground to solve existing problems faced by organizations raises the interest of organizations to participate in the PROMETHEUS Entrepreneurship Acceleration Platform. The Platform was successfully used in the implementation of the PROMETHEUS International Startup Competition 2022 increasing the engagement and interest of the students.

Joint lectures, events such as the PROMETHEUS 2nd InfoDay, and guest experts from the entrepreneurial world, raised the interest of students and academics.