In today’s post-Bologna world, students have access to a set of different opportunities. Being a college student previously meant investing five years of your life in a university in order to get substantial returns. Nowadays, students can absorb the fundamentals in only three years and have the chance to immediately start developing their own projects and validating their assumptions within the safety of accelerator programs across the world.

The format of each accelerator varies according to length, methodology and value proposition, but they all share the same objective: business model validation, exponential networking and investor exposure. Startups graduating these programs can expect to master a series of essential tools in order to further develop their ventures, combining their previous experience with methodologies such as The Lean Startup, Business Model Canvas and the Validation Board.

Since early-stage ventures learn by trial and error, the goal here is to get them to fail fast and fail cheap. By gathering dozens of startups and getting them to work under one roof founders learn from each other’s mistakes, get inspired by great speakers, mentored by industry experts and hear about new markets and investment models.

Entrepreneurial students and fresh-grads are now presented with alternatives to corporate life at big multinationals and have the chance to make their university projects matter. These new MBAs are prepared to efficiently manage their ventures and help them grow at a pace that universities are simply unable to match at this point in time. There’s a lot of value waiting for those willing to take the jump.

Tiago Pinto

Co-Founder and Vice-President at Beta-i, the minds behind Lisbon Challenge.