About
Why we're building an instrument for measuring entrepreneurial development.
The problem
Every university, accelerator and agency running an entrepreneurship programme can tell you how many founders took part, how many sessions ran, how many ventures were supported.
Almost none of them can tell you what changed for the people who went through it.
Not because nobody is looking — because measuring competence across forty founders, by hand, was never possible. So programmes report activity, and activity is all that survives to the end of term. Meanwhile the people who fund those programmes have started asking harder questions.
The gap
Europe has a framework for entrepreneurial competence. The European Commission published EntreComp in 2016: fifteen competences, eight levels, used across European higher education.
What it doesn't have is an instrument. The only validated tool measures self-perception — what founders believe about themselves, which is not the same as what they can do.
That gap is why we exist.
The idea
We don't ask founders to report on themselves. We score what they actually do.
Every coaching session, every simulation, every practised pitch is observed and scored against EntreComp as the programme runs. Alongside it we capture what founders believe about their own competence, before and after.
The gap between the two is the finding. A founder with a polished product and a shallow understanding rates themselves high and demonstrates low — which is exactly what a programme needs to see while there is still time to act.
Nobody fills anything in. The record builds because the programme runs.
Where this goes
The instrument is the start. What it produces is a record of how a founder developed — and that record should belong to the person, not the programme. Programmes change. Ventures end. The record outlives both.
If enough institutions measure the same way, comparison becomes possible for the first time. That is the point.