Guiding Principles for Mentors
Mentor Commitment
Mentors are principally concerned with educating entrepreneurs and assisting ventures to be commercially successful. By applying your collective experience to these ventures, you can provide a considerable level of expertise to ventures. The E-Scholars Program offers a practical curriculum of workshop-structured instruction designed to provide E-Scholars of all types with a practical academic framework for advancing their ventures. Mentors provide highly individualized coaching to ventures. UMKC mentors are volunteers from the corporate, entrepreneurial, and academic communities who want to share their skills and knowledge in creating and guiding successful new ventures. Qualified mentors typically have the following expertise: Business Expertise In addition, mentor/venture matches are based on a mentor’s expertise in: At UMKC, the Bloch School, and the Regnier Institute, our policy toward ownership of student-created intellectual property is simple: The student owns what the student creates. Neither the Institute nor the University takes any ownership in the ventures or ideas students create. We ask that mentors respect that policy, and recognize that student’s intellectual property belongs to the student. Please respect, as well, the need for strict confidentiality concerning any proprietary information revealed by E-Scholar entrepreneurs regarding their ventures. Developing any commercial relationship must be done with transparency and within the following guidelines: Meetings go better with an agenda. Open the session with a general discussion of the meeting’s purpose. Example: “Today, let’s cover three things: Problems, alternatives, and action steps…” Then, at the end of the meeting, you can recap: “Okay, today we covered these three things: The core problem was… We discussed several alternatives… The things you need to do next are…” The purpose is to focus on how to make the concept better, and how to expand the number of the student’s options. A student who walks in believing there is only one course of action open, but leaves feeling as though there are more options and more opportunities available, feels more energized and more enthusiastic about working even harder on the enterprise. You can turn any negative into an opportunity. Are customers having a difficult time with one of your features? That difficulty may point out that:
MENTOR RELATIONSHIP WITH VENTURES
TIPS FOR MENTORING
What you want to achieve is that when he or she leaves the meeting, the mentee fee ls better about the venture than when they walked in.
We’ll provide a handout with some suggested questions that you can apply to almost any venture. Many of these the E-Scholar had to answer these questions in the application to the program. It’s okay to remind the entrepreneur about them, and to show that you are aware of the steps in the process. What are other ways you can make money? What are other revenue options you might consider? If this is a single product, why does it have to be? Can you think of what the next products in your line ought to be? If you are going to a single market, must that be the case? Can you think of another usage segment, another geographic segment, or another price point that will expand the market? What are other ways you can make money? What are other revenue options you might consider? If this is a single product, why does it have to be? Can you think of what the next products in your line ought to be? If you are going to a single market, must that be the case? Can you think of another usage segment, another geographic segment, or another price point that will expand the market?
End with a clear path, a number of steps that outline what the E-Scholar could do.
