Entrepreneurship in Portugal
The partnership with Acredita Portugal was the motto for SayU Consulting, with its GO360""PR4Startups model, to integrate strategic communication aimed at startups into its offer. SayU Consulting has supported more than 150 finalist projects in Portugal's largest entrepreneurship competition, and the second largest in the world, over the last seven years.
Since 2014, SayU Consulting has been the communications arm of the Acredita Portugal association and one of the strategic partners in supporting the construction of the Portuguese entrepreneurial ecosystem as we know it today. From the association's repositioning strategy to communication support for all its initiatives - including the Banco Montepio Acredita Portugal competition, Acceler@Tech e Acredita Incubation the partnership has been an opportunity to evangelize the agents and stakeholders of the sector to the importance of investing in communication for the success of national startups.
Boosting the success of national startups is at the heart of Acredita Portugal's mission. As Fernando Fraga, the association's Innovation Director, explains, "The entrepreneurial spirit of the Portuguese has been confronted with a limited supply of training tools: there are few entities that support entrepreneurs with simpler business ideas to understand how they can do this in an economically sustainable way and there is a lack of funding capacity for smaller-scale projects. From this starting point, more than 100,000 projects have been supported, more than 11,000 business plans developed and several dozen projects incubated."
"Part of the challenge, in such a heterogeneous environment, is to be able to highlight the validity of this type of opportunity and show what extraordinary things Portuguese entrepreneurs are doing. This is an objective in which communication - and the particular role of SayU Consulting - is of fundamental importance."concludes Fernando Fraga.
Demonstrating the importance of investing strategically in communication has been the focus of SayU Consulting's intervention. As Marta Gonçalves, Managing Partner of the consultancy, explains, "The last few years have seen an explosion in the Startup phenomenon. Entrepreneurship has become a recurring term in business vocabulary and never before have we seen so many projects being born. But when everything is new, how can we differentiate ourselves, be relevant and carve out our own space? Communication has emerged as a function of growing importance, assuming a new priority position among the strategic thinking of brands. This is the way to have a voice before stakeholders and ensure representativeness in a context where everyone thinks they have something to show and a story to tell. Knowing how to do this, and having the expertise and tools to make it happen, is the great challenge of communicating entrepreneurship.
The dozens of entrepreneurship projects and startups supported in recent years with GO360> PR4Startups validated the importance of investment and investment in communication in overcoming the obstacles that these new projects encounter and the role that communication plays in contact with partners, investors and customers, leveraging the entire process of accelerating these new businesses"Marta Gonçalves added.
The "GO360" model is today a communication methodology designed to provide a structured communication response to startups and emerging projects and to support their business goals, having served as a lever for positioning the national entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystem.
Supporting different dimensions of entrepreneurship
In addition to supporting the Banco Montepio Acredita Portugal competition, the largest entrepreneurship competition in the country aimed at anyone with a business idea, SayU Consulting has also developed its activities in support of other dimensions of Acredita Portugal's activity, with a direct association to the world of entrepreneurship. Both with the definition and implementation of actions to promote new platforms (Acredita Incubation), or through support integrated into the prizes awarded to international projects (Acceler@Tech).
The space Acredita Incubation is an incubation project designed to provide support and tools to entrepreneurs in the areas of creative industries, technological entrepreneurship and the social economy, born out of a partnership between Acredita Portugal and Vila Nova de Gaia City Council.
O Acceler@Tech is an international accelerator program, organized by Acredita Portugal and supported by Turismo de Portugal, which aims to attract the best business ideas and startups linked to the strategic tourism sector to Portugal.
About Acredita Portugal
Acredita Portugal is a non-profit organization focused on the development and promotion of national entrepreneurship. It was born in 2008 with the mission of fostering a culture of possibility to unleash the entrepreneurial potential of the Portuguese, seeking to develop the entrepreneurial spirit and perseverance of the Portuguese who believe in their projects but who lack the opportunity to realize them. Additional information at https://acreditaportugal.pt/.
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