ACREDITA Portugal opens applications for the 5th edition of the largest entrepreneurship contest
The world's largest entrepreneurship competition was launched today and is accepting business ideas through December 14. It offers 500,000 euros in prizes and a free educational tool that allows any participant to turn their idea into a business plan.
Lisbon, November 25, 2014 – The Acredita Portugal entrepreneurship competition, which received more than 14,000 business ideas in its last edition, accepts applications from any industry, regardless of the stage of development.
It offers two exam profiles: the Make Your Dream Come True and InovPortugalThese work in parallel and are aimed at different types of projects.
O Make Your Dream Come True aims to ensure that anyone, regardless of age, educational background, or ideas, can carry out their entrepreneurial project and is intended for projects in the fields of commerce, services, industry, and social entrepreneurship. The competition InovPortugal It is aimed at projects involving technological innovation, breakthroughs, and global ambition.
Participation is free and takes just 30 seconds. The contest begins with a simple 300-character description of an idea. The evaluation phase, which begins in January using the online software DreamShaper, aims to assess the feasibility of each project and its suitability for a business plan. In the last edition of the contest, more than 2,000 projects moved on to the business plan stage.
A total of €500,000 in prize money is available to help fund the best projects.
For João Gonçalo Cunha, CEO of Acredita Portugal, “The results achieved in the latest edition of the Acredita Portugal competition demonstrate that there is a tremendous appetite for innovation and for taking risks on new projects. Our role is to effectively support these candidates, enable them to develop their proposals, and assess whether these can succeed in the market. It is with this goal in mind that, in the latest edition of this initiative, we trained 42,700 entrepreneurs and provided more than 65,000 hours of training. The entrepreneurial spirit and the desire to do something different are there; we simply need to make the resources available to promote the culture of possibility".