Santander Universities Chile has launched the first edition of IDEAS X, an initiative that seeks to train, accelerate and reward up to 60 business ideas with the aim of promoting an entrepreneurial culture among students.

Banco Santander Chile, through Santander Universities, has launched Ideas X, the new entrepreneurship award for undergraduate university students that will become part of the global offer of entrepreneurial initiatives promoted by Santander throughout the world through Santander X.

The call will remain open until December 18 at www.santanderx.com.    

The director of Santander Universities Chile, Rodrigo Machuca, highlighted that this initiative "promotes entrepreneurship among young university students and forms part of one of the strategic lines of action of Santander Universities, which has more than 50 collaboration agreements with public universities and Chilean private institutions and supports more than 200 universities around the world”.

The 60 best projects, with a team of between 2 and 4 people, will participate in an online training process through digital capsules that will address issues of Needfinding, Definition and Focus of proposals. Subsequently, the 40 best ideas will go to a second stage of pre-incubation, whose protagonists will participate in a 10-day face-to-face training process in which they will study how to turn the ideas into functional prototypes, with a clear business model and a valid strategy for bring the product to market.

Those who successfully pass this phase will participate in a one-day bootcamp together with expert mentors where entrepreneurs will receive feedback and advice on their project.

Subsequently, and after the evaluation of a 5-minute pitch, the 20 best will receive an initial capital of 1 million pesos each to improve their prototype and will be accelerated with a 2-month process accompanied by an expert.

Another evaluation committee will select 10 entrepreneurial projects that will obtain a prize of up to 5 million pesos to work on their project, in addition to participating in a monitoring and accompaniment program by Santander for the following 6 months.

Source: Santander Universities Chile