About the project

The Ready for Equity! Project was launched in October 2006 to identify and address the key issues impeding business angel activity across the European business community. Led by UK based Finance South East, the project brings together partners involved in early stage equity investment from Belgium, Malta, Spain, Italy, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands.

The project is both a response to the market failure in early stage capital and a recognition of the lack of understanding within European enterprises of the equity market. The failure reflects not only on angels and their lack of awareness of how to act efficiently in the market but also entrepreneurs and their lack of investment readiness. The development of training curricula can help to solve the identified problems.

Results

The project has developed and tested two Europe-wide training curricula targeted at improving the capacity of informal investors and business angels, and to prepare entrepreneurs seeking finance from those informal investors.

Over the course of the project the partners have shared best practice and compared the tools and mechanisms in place throughout the different European regions in order to develop the curricula. A Mapping Exercise “Analysis of the supply and demand for informal venture capital” was published in 2007 and updated in 2008.

The curricula have been developed to be independent of the method of delivery of the training. Following completion of the project it is intended that multiple training products will be developed in various countries, both by the Project Partners and others. These will be in a variety of formats, for example classroom, e-learning etc. and can be deployed right across Europe, particularly in the emerging economies of the European Union.

These will enhance both the quality and quantity of business angel deals, thus benefiting investors, companies and business angel network managers.

The Ready for Equity! Final Conference

For the Power Point Presentations of the following interventions, please click on the respective titles below:

• Paul Delahunty - Presenting the Ready for Equity! Project and results


• Vesa Vanhanen - The importance of Investment Readiness for SMEs, in particular for Emerging Markets


• Mark Turner - The impact of Investment Readiness programmes in the UK


• Nelson Gray - Key note speech Investment Readiness as a pan-European issue


• Uffe Bundgaard-Jorgensen - Panel 2: Investment Readiness: an Outlook, about sector specific investment readiness

Conference Gallery

More information coming soon..