iDea is a novel early stage funding concept





		Innovation Dipole Entrepreneurial Assessment (iDea) iDea is a novel Entrepreneurial Assessment and early stage funding/incubating framework that can be implemented by Governments and/or Institutions, which is based on Innovation Dipole web centric Crowd Sourced peer selection process. Entrepreneurs iDea framework supplies all the necessary means like, initial assessment, financing, mentoring, incubating and networking that allowing, regardless of the country’s entrepreneurial environment using Crowd Sourcing techniques, entrepreneurs, inventors, researchers, creative persons and business developers in a total transparent and democratic way, to freely elect best ideas, mix and match in order to commercialize these ideas and innovate and all that without lengthy and useless "to be revised", business plans. While on the same time totally eliminates the burden of fundraising, by removing all imposed barriers, like unwilling investors, committees of experts, own capital clause and such. Investors iDea framework allows investors all around the world, to act in a shadow mode without disclosing their identities or interest to the ventures, in order to assess and track evolution, financials and growth momentum of start-up ventures hosted by iDea mechanism and finally target their investments freely and away from the so called “Death valley”. While on the same time, if they want to get in earlier, the mechanism allows that to happen in an institutional way. Governments, Institutions and Communities iDea provides the necessary framework to ignite an entrepreneurial circle of growth, to foster competiveness and grow jobs and opportunities for all, a framework that is designed to be scalable, to fast bypass all local legislation deadlocks, to maximize the effects of the supplied funds, with simple organization structure, operated without the need of expensive expertise, flexible to be policy driven and finally, sustainable by recycling funds in an eight years cycle. While on the same time provides the necessary democratic authorization in a clean and transparent way, to invest taxpayer’s money or community subsidies back to the community, to SME’s and creative persons without crowding-out none. iDea achieves to mobilize community’s human capital, knowledge, talents and skills to promote prosperity for all, through the successful and massive application of entrepreneurship and innovation. The abstract of iDea What we call “Innovation Dipole”, is the duality of a creative mindset on one side of a dipole and a business mindset on the other. This dipole has to be in perfect complementary balance and in resonance, to naturally create value and to innovate. The actors that materialize the Innovation Dipole are the entrepreneurs (or idea promoters) on one side along with the experienced business developers on the other. Using a funnel filtered matching mechanism, iDea totally eliminates the need for unnecessary business plan writing, lengthy proposals and committees of experts from the initial assessment phase, by utilizing Crowd Sourcing techniques. By implementing the Innovation Dipole for the evaluation of all ideas, a massive cross-assessment is promoted, leading to a mutual selection/matching of a pair of partners that are to be incorporated for profit. This evaluation ensures that no one will loose time running a business that is based on a bad idea or cooperating with an ineffective partner, without any kind of return. Given the fact that all selected ventures are running within specially designed incubators those allowing strict financial accountability of the flow of funds according to reached milestones with the help of a Crowd Sourced judging body that also acts as Mentoring source. This simple assessment method leads to a web-centric, Crowd Sourced peer selection process, driven only by ideas, profitable targets, market needs, business instinct, talent, motivated work and team chemistry, aiming to produce massive materialized innovation with high success rates and large economies of scale that specialized incubators can provide along with community voluntary expertise. At the same time all types of investors play a key role in the process by having, through iDea web portal, total access on the successful ventures activities, reports and presentations in order to evaluate risk versus return and decide their potential investments. iDea framework uses all existing and/or new infrastructures to incubate, all community resources to provide mentoring and professional services along with specialized recourses from University labs and Research Centers, while it keeps all the running costs down using economies of scale and extensive outsourcing on the early stages of the ventures activities. All that is possible through the use of a cloud based Innovation Resource Planning (IRP) web portal that manages all the flow of value exchanging relationships of all involved parties in a transparent and effective way. iDea results to an institutionally funded self sustained system, designed to recycle funds in an eight year cycle with a bottom-up approach, using effectively the power of new media to democratize access to capital by shifting the driving force from physical to intellectual assets, allowing everyone to be part of a mechanism that makes innovation driven growth, an easy creative game that all have access to and learn from. The aims of iDea funding framework are: To capture all useful and good ideas, massively, To create massively Jobs, To democratize access to capital and rebalance wealth distribution, To allow everyone, without the barrier of own capital, to participate and innovate, To bypass local entrepreneurial cultural barriers and allow equal opportunities, To stimulate entrepreneurs by removing red tape, To base our success on actually tried ideas and not in crystal ball guessing, To do more and talk less, since innovation is about doing things and not blah, blah, blah... To create effective and sustainable business models by really testing them on market, To utilize capital on startups and not in unuseful committees and risk averse organizations, To rely the success of our communities in our people's drive and not in a handful of "experts", To remove funding management costs from early stage funding rounds, To minimize the cost of failure, To utilize effectively all community resources that today are hidden and scattered all around, To get VC's triggered to invest in risk that they can really understand and want to take, To get Business Angels inspired, To break the “chicken and egg” loop of No funding->No revenues & No revenues->No funding, To have a geographically independent mechanism, To capitalize failure and create business excellence, To unleash people's potential...!!! The funding entity can be either, non-for-profit or for-profit, depending on the aims of the shareholders, i.e. it can be a public/private partnership, a private institution or a public fund. By tailoring the various parameters of the mechanism we can aim to certain goals such as export based growth, green innovation etc. Within the iDea framework, we can select and finance University and Research spin-offs. Key role in the mechanism are also performing Incubators and Business Accelerators. The Financials As an example, to finance a mechanism that runs with iDea framework for 4 years, utilizing 4 incubators with 20 persons stuff each, able to host 25 startup each along with a collaborative space that can facilitate 100 people for proof of concept, plus 20 persons stuff needed for the mechanism along with advertising budged of 1Mil-euros/year, we can fund with 100% capital: 100 startups with average capital of 300K euro’s each, 300 seeds with 40K euro’s each, 600 pre-seed with average of 15K euro’s each. The budged for all the above is just 75Mil euro’s and includes ALL costs for four years. In example, to understand the magnitude of the introduced savings that can happen with iDea Framework; if we do the same amount of ventures "tries" with classic Fund managers and VC's, we will need to burn for Just the Fund Managers "management fees" the sum of about 35Mil euro's before we invest even one euro to the ventures themselves... let alone Incubator costs and other actions that need to happen to succeed an action like that... iDea framework, leads to an early stage funding mechanism which will, on the hands of Governments and/or Institutions, unleash new entrepreneurial innovation and drive growth, worldwide. What iDea claim’s, is that the typical early stage funding mechanisms can be standardized and with the power of new media, can be driven by the people for the people. The ultimate goal of the concept is to democratize access to capital and not to create another web based investor/entrepreneur matching service. The philosophy of iDea framework teaches that, innovation is all about ideas and people, not only capital. iDea Framework White Paper Click below on the link to open a .PDF document that was submitted to EU Commission regarding a call for proposals regarding to Innovation Subsidies in Europe. iDea Framework, a practical guide to revolute Innovation, 2.87Mbyte: http://bit.ly/q6WolG Tweet