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with them to really structure their work, input
and how to measure the impact that they
have. One month ago they won a national
award for volunteers, which is the first
recognition of their work. For this organisation
we are working less on developing their idea,
and more on trying to improve their
measurement and promoting their own
organisation, because that was the thing that
was missing the most.
Another organisation that we incubated is an
organisation that is working with the
protection of sea life. Our work with them was
to plan and to think about what they want to
do. We started working with them from the
very beginning stages of the project. Now
they are a legal structure, and they have
already won work on a European project.
These are two very different projects which
we work with differently; one that is well
developed and one that we helped in the very
early beginnings.
What, in your experience, have been the
challenges around helping incubates working
on their ideas and their offerings and making
them ready for market?
One of the challenges is the bureaucratic and
legal regulations in Portugal. It is very time
consuming, you need to visit a lot of offices
and it can be difficult to know which kind of
licences and certificates that you need to do a
certain type of work.
Finance is another challenge, for sure. In
Portugal it is hard to get funding for testing
out new ideas. If you have already done a
pilot and have proved that your idea works,
then access to funding is easier, but not many
funders are willing to fund the piloting stage
as it is too risky.
A challenge for us as incubators is also that
many of our incubatees do not have funding,
and because they don’t have sustainable
funding they ten