C4DI Accelerator Program Launched

I got this slide from Jon's deck today. I hope he won't mind...

Today Robert and I went down to C4DI in Hull to see the start of something big, the launch of the C4DI accelerator program. An accelerator program is a way of making ideas real. Take a good idea, a bunch of folks that want to run with it, add in some mentoring and a ton of hard work and you should end up with a strong pitch that will get you on the road to great things. 

C4DI have partnered with PwC who will be supporting the enterprise, along with Handlesbanken, Campaign Monitor, FreeAgent and Ebuyer. 

The principle is that you get funding, a place to work and support and mentoring in exchange for a chunk of your action, on the basis that any percentage of something is better than 100% of nothing.

Selection starts in October this year, with the first teams in place by February 2015. Then, later in the year they will hold the final pitches and demo day. There's space for 8 teams, each of which will get up to 16K of  seed investment and 16K of match funding to keep them going over the 90 day incubation period. (I stole all these facts from Jon's presentation - go there if you want more details and a picture of a dog dressed as a horse). 

This is such wonderful stuff. I would so love it if some of our graduating students took that amazing idea they don't know what to do with, and ran it through the C4DI accelerator.