Background and goals
The Leaders in Innovation Fellowship (LIF) is a Royal Academy of Engineering program that supports academic engineers from 16 partnership countries to the United Kingdom in their technology commercialisation efforts.
The foundation of the program is a 2-week residential training in London, which addresses the entrepreneurial mindset of the engineers. Non-entrepreneurs experience what it’s like to become more entrepreneurial, engineers focussing initially on patent licensing are encouraged to look at options for setting up a startup, and vice-versa. Lastly the experienced serial founders participating in the program are supported to take on leadership roles to guide the others in the fellowship on their commercialisation journey.
This all takes place in a setting where the visiting engineers are exposed as much as possible to the UK technology business ecosystem, as to forge new, and lasting relationships between the UK, and global emerging technology networks.
Qualifications and role of the mentors
The key components of the LIF program are mentorship, and training. We build on people with experience in running businesses for this. Both trainers, and mentors have carried, or still do carry risks in business decision making, and have built up significant entrepreneurial trackrecord in engineering businesses. This experience is crucial to addressing mindset of the LIF’ers, and moving them forward. Also this experience is necessary to jointly calibrate the content of the training to best meet the LIF’ers needs for support and learning.
Mentors have built up coaching skills from guiding entrepreneurs, businesses in a variety of contexts before.
Mentor activities in the program.
Mentors are involved in the program to provide personal guidance to their group of 3 LIF’ers. Mentors are expected to lead on the following activities, and to be available in London for the program at specific times during the program.
- Participate in an onboarding meeting in London to clarify the training program, and the mentoring role (4hrs)
- Calibrate with their mentee group (45 min each) no later that November 11th, when the program starts
- In-person introductions during the program opening (4 hrs) November 12th 9:00-12:30
- Mentor Session 1: Work on business model and assumptions, getting the fellows to make the most of their relationships while in London, and calibrate further support the LIF’ers need from their trainers during a retrospective. (full day) November 15th
- Mentor Session 2: Building a storyline for their business, and encourage deeper fact finding to substantiate their claims to the market (full day) November 21st
- Mentor Session 3: Guiding the Fellows’ pitching for the final day (full day). November 22nd
- Attending the final pitching (in person, or through a livestream broadcast) (2 hrs) November 23rd
- Follow-on calls (4h per fellow) Based the arrangement with each fellow.
Here is a simple overview of the timings of the activities during the 2 weeks of the residential programme:
Applications
Please send a brief letter of motivation and CV for the mentoring role to lino@source.institute. We strongly encourage applications from female mentors. Due to logistical complexities, we will only consider applications from mentors who live near the London locality.