

4 weeks to materialise their ideas, 4 minutes to pitch them: such was the challenge some 80 EM Normandie students had to take up during the InsIDE Challenger Contest. Their goal: to get a place within the School-Incubator and make their entrepreneurial projects come true.
Supported by means of mentoring sessions and on-line workshops (lean startup, lean business canvas, pitch, etc.), students had to identify their targets, validate the market needs, finetune their positioning and prepare a pitch to stand out when in front of the jury. The jury was composed of InsIDE tutors, expert partners (Fidal, AMCE Normandie, VD MMA Associates, Normandy French Tech, Opteam, Green Research, Cohin Environment, Crédit Agricole Normandie Seine, Fastpoint, Oxford, CCI Vikin_), and former InsIDE incubator graduates. They had to assess the overall performance by the students and their motivations in order to select those more likely to take up successfully the demanding route to entrepreneurship.
About forty students are registered for the Apollo and Atlantis booster programmes. Respectively designed to help junior projects take off and more mature projects to develop, these two programmes include thematic workshops (product viability tests, fundraising, business development, etc.), networking operations and individual and collective coaching sessions, given at InsIDE, with its premium partners and sectoral experts (lawyers, chartered accountants, web developers, web marketers, etc.).
« The large number of student contenders and the high quality of projects have imposed a very high degree of selection. However, the mission of InsIDE is also to encourage students with entrepreneurial spirits and promising ideas even though the latter may still be at a nascent stage. Accordingly, we have started a new scheme, ‘InsIDE Rising Stars’, to offer these new talents the opportunity to refine on their projects thanks to a mentoring programme given by InsIDE team members. Such students will have the option to join the incubator when all indicators are positive » Jean-Philippe Derout, Head of InsIDE explains.
A new Challenger Contest is scheduled for January 2019.