Early support for a science- and technology-based startup can determine its future success

Source: Forbes Chile

In general, all startups need support, especially in their early stages, when the chances of failure are very high. Moreover, in the local context, that support becomes even more important, since only in recent years have the first major success stories of Chilean startups emerged, so we still have a long way to go alongside entrepreneurs.

In the case of science-based startups (EBCTs), support is doubly necessary, both because of the nature of these ventures and because of the profile of their founders.

EBCTs are characterized by complex development cycles shaped by technical, regulatory, intellectual property and financial factors, among others, which directly affects the time they need to reach the market, which is usually longer. In addition, most of these ventures are made up of highly qualified people from a technical standpoint (most with master’s and/or doctoral degrees), but with very little experience in sales and new business development.

Given these characteristics of EBCTs, support in the early stages is decisive for the success these ventures may achieve in the future.

This support must be highly personalized and take a multidisciplinary view, analyzing the venture from technical, strategic, financial and commercial perspectives, since these startups can fail for a variety of reasons, such as an error in validating the technology, a poorly designed intellectual property strategy and, above all, team-building problems.

All of Know Hub’s programs, and in particular those that seek to promote the creation and acceleration of EBCTs, aim to energize the innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem so that more and better EBCTs emerge, enabling Chile to move toward far more inclusive, sustainable and decentralized economic and social development. In that sense, we are convinced that these companies have the characteristics and agility needed to diversify and add sophistication to our productive matrix.

If we want to move toward a knowledge-based economy, we need more and more successful EBCTs that generate not only jobs, but better-quality jobs. To achieve that, we need to strengthen our ecosystem with greater access to public funding for early stages, more flexibility for researchers at universities and research centers to pursue their entrepreneurial initiatives, and more private funding for these EBCTs when they reach their growth and expansion stages.

Read the opinion column published in Forbes Chile here:https://forbes.cl/red-forbes/2022-07-20/el-acompanamiento-inicial-en-un-emprendimiento-de-base-cientifica-tecnologica-puede-determinar-el-exito-futuro/