Twenty finalists have already been shortlisted weeks prior to Friday’s announcement, with the participants now billeted at the First Pacific Leadership Academy in Antipolo City to receive initial mentoring and advice from MVP Group executives before their final pitch at the end of the week.
Among the executives present during the three-day bootcamp in Antipolo include Smart’s Chief Wireless Advisor Orlando Vea, who will form part of the six-member panel — including the likes of IdeaSpace President Earl Martin Valencia and PLDT Chairman Manny V. Pangilinan — that will judge and determine the winners of the competition.
The twenty finalists will have to undergo a grueling pitching session that would test the resiliency of their business ideas in the real world, as evaluated and examined by seasoned business veterans in the PLDT group–easily one of the biggest conglomerates in the country which includes investments in telecommunications, media, utilities, mining, hospitals, and expressways.
InterAksyon.com is the online news portal of TV5, one of the companies under the PLDT Group.
Eight of the finalists came from Metro Manila, five from Cebu, and two each from Davao and Angeles City in Pampanga. Other finalists hailed from Leyte, Zamboanga, and Sorsogon.
Their start-up ideas range from an affordable water purification machine for households to low-cost joint implants for the Asian market. One of the finalists is also developing rumble strips that produce electricity on high-traffic roads, while another seeks to develop a new wind turbine design for maximum energy production.
Once admitted into the six-month incubation program, each winning start-up will receive an initial P500,000 in seed funding, which can go up to as much as P5 million at the end of incubation. Promising start-ups that will graduate from the program may possibly be acquired by companies under the PLDT Group and have their business ideas fully developed for the market.
Each start-up would also have to undergo a structured program hosted by the Leadership Academy, “to teach them the fundamentals on how to run a successful and scalable business,” the group said.
They will also be provided with their own space at the IdeaSpace office in Makati, as well as living quarters near the area, aside from mentoring from top Filipino technopreneurs and executives from the MVP Group of Companies.
The unique come-on for potential start-ups to join the MVP Group’s IdeaSpace is the diversity of businesses they could cooperate with, aside from the scale of each individual businesses, executives said.
In an earlier interview, Valencia said start-ups tend to look for partnership opportunities with large corporations in order to scale and spread their technologies.
“They want to partner with companies because they know that these corporations have the resources to take their unique ideas global,” said Valencia, who moved back from the Philippines after managing the strategy and incubation division for the emerging technologies group at networking giant Cisco in the US.
By providing a platform with which these start-ups can scale up their technology innovations, Valencia said technopreneurs would then be able to build a solid foundation to bring their ideas to neighboring countries and, eventually, worldwide.
Launched in March 2012, IdeaSpace is an initiative PLDT Group of Companies that seeks to find early-stage startups that offer solutions for industries such as telecommunications, water and power utilities, toll roads, and media, among many others.
source: interaksyon.com
