Over the past year, Startium has been working with Gentrepreneur, a collaboration between six universities and colleges in the Ghent region, to help strengthen entrepreneurship support for students and researchers.
Through the partnership, Startium’s ecosystem platform now provides the digital infrastructure that underpins the Gentrepreneur network, helping connect entrepreneurs to opportunities, coaching, and regional expertise.
In the last 12 months alone, more than 1,000 university entrepreneurs have engaged with support through the platform, accessing opportunities including events, competitions, funding programmes, and coaching support.
Gentrepreneur brings together six higher education institutions that work collaboratively to support student and researcher entrepreneurs across the region. While each university operates its own internal systems, the network required a shared platform that could operate across institutions to coordinate activity and measure impact.
Startium’s platform provides a single digital access point for entrepreneurship support while enabling coaches to collaborate more effectively across the network. The technology also helps Gentrepreneur match entrepreneurs with the right opportunities at the right stage of their journey and build a growing knowledge base of regional expertise.
Importantly, the platform enables the partnership to track engagement and measure outcomes, supporting the reporting requirements of the economic development organisations funding the initiative
The partnership was made possible with the support of Invest Northern Ireland and VLAIO, whose collaboration helped facilitate Startium’s introduction to the Belgian ecosystem and the Gentrepreneur partnership in the Ghent region.
Chris Shannon, Co-Founder and Director of Startium, said:
“Gentrepreneur is a fantastic example of what can happen when universities collaborate to support the next generation of entrepreneurs.
Our role has been to provide the digital infrastructure that allows those institutions to work together and connect entrepreneurs to the right opportunities, events, and expertise. Seeing more than 1,000 entrepreneurs engage through the platform in the past year has been incredibly rewarding.”
The partnership highlights the growing role of digital infrastructure in helping universities, incubators, and ecosystem partners collaborate more effectively to support founders.
Startium looks forward to continuing to support Gentrepreneur and its partner institutions as they expand their work to support the next generation of entrepreneurs in the region.
Gentrepreneur is a collaboration between six universities and colleges in the Ghent region that supports students and researchers in developing entrepreneurial ideas and launching ventures.
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