Certified Starter & Best Pitch 2025

The recipient of this Certified Starter & Best Pitch badge contributed to an assigned, multidisciplinary team that evolved a business concept from ideation to investor pitch, evolving an entrepreneurial spirit and capacities fundamental to creating a start-up through practical activities.

Each team was accompanied by a mentor, identified real pain points among a target group, and developed a innovative idea in response to address them.

Participants attended mixed theoretical and practical sessions addressing an introduction to the entrepreneurial process, design thinking, marketing principles, business planning, innovation and lean product development, prototyping and manufacturing, creating and managing entrepreneurial teams, financing new ventures, social entrepreneurship, protecting and exploiting intellectual property, and how to pitch their ideas.

All sessions directly related to practical challenges that the teams used to evolve and iterate their ideas over the semester, ultimately consolidating these into a cohesive business plan.

Finally, each team presented their innovative ideas during a pitch competition, in which they demonstrated their core value propositions and solutions.

Teams receiving the Best Pitch distinction received recognition of "Best Pitch" during the program's Pitch Competition from a jury of experts. Their final results were evaluated based on the problem identified, solution proposed, market potential, financing strategy, team quality, and pitch delivery.

Each team and its respective members have evolved key entrepreneurial skills during the evolution of their concepts.

Cooperation with others via the learning, development, and presentation of concepts across multiple months and project phases. Conflict management and adaptability during moments of diverging interests, perspectives and objectives, to ultimately determine a single collaborative direction. Self-management to motivate themselves and execute tasks among new colleagues and an unfamiliar work environment. Empathetic listening via first-person research in which they extracted insights by loving and understanding a customer's painful problem, as well as during validation of the value proposition of new ideas. Accepting feedback from potential customers, mentors, instructors, program coordinators, peers and jury members to evolve and strengthen their business concept.

See additional regulations for NOVA Starter's Academy 2025 program here.