Grant: Engage Grants Program

VA Angels has developed a program for entrepreneurs that enhances and supports the creation / expansion ofsustainable, investable, scalable innovation-to-SME development. This program curricula integrates business,finance, ethics and investment literacy with leadership skills and risk self-awareness. At the current stage,expertise is required to manually create different learning paths specifically for each entrepreneur. This requiresan incredible amount of manpower and in-person program facilitation. It is critical to automate this task. Thisproject will develop an automatic system that can be used to create scalable digital curricula that adapts to eachentrepreneur's unique profile. If it succeeds, it will greatly increase the scalability of the company, allowinglicensees to run a high-quality integrated program in urban settings as well as small and/or remotecommunities.Each entrepreneur's innovative process is unique and constantly evolving. To ensure that the customizationsoftware tailors itself to these unique thought processes, evolving with the entrepreneur and allowing each toachieve their innovation and business potential, our project will involve proper modelling and learningapproaches, creation of a digital curriculum to bridge critical / abstract thinking (self-awareness, creativeinnovation), and real-world entrepreneurship, as well as a proper practice for integrating a scalabilitycomponent to address evolution of the module database.Research shows that technology, innovation, and scalable SME's are crucial to increasing Canada's globalpresence and angel investors play an important part in the process of SME development and scalability.Entrepreneurial training, mentoring, and access to capital are common barriers to startup and SME scalabilityand this project will create a customized curricula to bridge this gap between innovation and investability,allowing entrepreneurs to develop their ventures on a track that is sustainable, profitable and investable,increasing both angel investment opportunity and SME success.