CRM for incubators - measure progress in your portfolio of Startups

Measure & Report Readiness Level

Many incubators use Readiness Level in their daily work and reporting. Do you?

Measuring a business idea and its progress through Readiness levels divided into different dimensions is a way to track its progress and maturity. Incubators can work differently with dimensions that suit their operations and focus, you choose which ones are important to you. Below you can see some examples of common dimensions that incubators typically choose to work with.

Example dimensions
Technology (TRL)
Marketing (MRL)
Business (BRL)
Customer (CRL)
Team (TMRL)
IPR (IRL)
Funding (FRL)
Sustainability (SRL)

You can create your own dimensions and readiness levels that are important to you

If your incubator uses Readiness Level and measures this on your Startups, you can use a customizable module in Incu to facilitate this. The tool provides an opportunity to create which Dimensions and Readiness Levels are relevant to you and that you want to use to measure your Startups development. You can of course also choose names for the different phases. Incu provides the framework with functionality to measure and report, but you choose how you want to configure it. Simple and easy!

Work with RL individually on each Startup in your portfolio of business ideas

Once you have configured your dimensions and levels, you can start using them directly on your portfolio of Startups. Each Startup in Incu has the ability to store its data with its progress through the dimensions and levels you created in the tool. You can easily update, write a comment or look at history - directly on a Startup within Incu.

Below is a screenshot where a user is working with the different Readiness Levels on a Startup.

Below, the user has updated the RL on Business from 3 => 4 and written a comment about this movement. We also see how the % in the pie chart shows progress from 74% to now 81%.

Reporting

When you have worked with your portfolio of Startups and filled in the Startup companies' Readiness Levels, you want to be able to generate a report, right? Incu gives you an easy way to extract different reports on your portfolio of Startups.

Question: Can I go back in time and see what the different levels were on a specific date?

Answer: Yes! If in September you need to report what levels your portfolio had at the mid-year point on June 30, what happens if someone has updated levels since then? Won't I get the most recently updated levels instead? No - you won't! Since all history and updates of Readiness Levels are saved in Incu, you can easily go back in time and retrieve a snapshot of what the different levels were at a specific date.

Below is an example of a report from Incu. The report lists 5 Startups and shows the levels that were current as of November 30, 2024, even if changes have occurred since then. We get a quick visual overview of which phases and levels each Startup had at the date. Reporting data is retrieved ready-made, with just a few clicks.

Save time & resources

When all information is stored in one system that all colleagues work in, the information is available when needed.

You might want to forget everything that has to do with:

Excel's error message "The file is locked for editing by [Username]. Open it as read-only or try again later."
Emailing around / sending in Teams chat: "Can whoever has the reporting file open in Excel close it. I need to enter my numbers."
Wait. Try again. Wait a bit longer.
Emails with new versions of Excel sheets that need to be synced with your master sheet.
Having to cut and paste from one sheet to another.
Now I got yet another new version from colleague XY, so I guess I'll save that on my computer as _FINAL.xls. Oh, that already exists? Then I'll use _FINAL2.xls.
Not being sure which is the most recently updated version.

If we play with the thought that an incubator with 10 coaches and 20 reporting companies works about 1 hour / company during reporting periods. Add to that the reporting manager's work collecting data from colleagues, finally hoping that the right versions and most recently updated numbers have been pasted into the master sheet. When you add this up, it becomes many hours at each reporting occasion. This is time that could probably have been used more effectively, and make a bigger difference somewhere else.

Summary

You choose dimensions yourself
All Startups have their own data
All history is saved for each Startup
Report snapshots from a specific date, even backwards in time
Save time & resources and get a good overview - every day
Dynamically configurable functionality to suit your needs!

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