A journey once split between a showcase website, external partners and shared files, now structured in a single environment
Flutter SEA is the Southern Europe & Africa division of the Flutter group, which runs SISAL in Italy. For years SISAL has run GoBeyond, an open innovation programme that discovers and accelerates startups through vertical challenges on themes tied to social and environmental impact.
It is a programme with significant numbers: over 2,600 startups involved, €495,000 in equity-free grants awarded, 888 collaborations launched across eleven calls in Italy, Morocco and Turkey. Selected startups gain access to a grant, an acceleration programme and the chance to develop a pilot project with the group or with partners in its network.
Yet a programme of this kind was being managed in a fragmented way and, in recent years, the number of applications and the programme’s complexity had grown steadily: a step change was needed to keep growing the programme while keeping its processes under control.
The setup GoBeyond had relied on until then worked, but it was held together by different platforms and suppliers. The website, managed by an agency, was a showcase that served only to collect applications into a separate database. Evaluation was entrusted to an external partner, working from exported files. Training was delivered separately, on yet another environment.
As applications grew, coordinating multiple suppliers and passing content and evaluations around by hand had become difficult to scale.
The solution emerged from the meeting between Flutter SEA and blendX at DigithON, a startup event whose jury included SISAL’s innovation manager: blendX was awarded access to GoBeyond to develop a pilot project. That pilot became, in effect, the opportunity to turn GoBeyond itself into a programme structured on a single platform.
BlendX started from its own model for managing calls for startups and adapted it to GoBeyond. The gobeyond.info website was rebuilt entirely on blendX, keeping the same visual identity thanks to the platform’s full customisation capabilities.
Behind the website, the blendX infrastructure manages the whole journey: applications land directly in the backend, where they proceed through the evaluation flow, the involvement of jury partners, the delivery of the acceleration programme and the management of pilot projects.
The structure of the old website was imported and re-engineered, with content verified together with the innovation team, and the training materials available to startups were brought onto the same platform. To complete the setup, control dashboards and reporting were prepared for those running the programme.
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