In the face of increasing pressure to innovate and the need for digital transformation, medium-sized companies are seeking to invest in technology start-ups in order to expand their business portfolio. As a medium-sized banking partner, cooperative banks in particular contribute to financing the innovation projects of such companies. In Baden-Württemberg alone, loans granted by Volksbanks and Raiffeisenbanks totalled 33.5 billion euros in 2015. In order to evaluate the allocation of funds or participation, both investors and companies need to evaluate innovative business concepts. For medium-sized companies, however, the effort for the analysis of business plan texts is often not possible and there is a lack of empirically supported methods for a reliable evaluation on the part of banks, other capital providers and investors.
The desired results form the basis for the reduction of effort in the evaluation process of business concepts and the support of start-ups to strengthen their survivability. By supporting capital providers and investors, ValueVentPro makes an overall contribution to strengthening the industrial and start-up landscape: better methods for evaluating business concepts reduce hurdles in the allocation of capital and can also improve the targeted support provided by intermediaries. This can counteract the nationwide trend of declining start-up numbers and thus promote growth and the creation of new jobs. In order to continue the research project in the sense of a practice-relevant exploitation, interest parties could be supported in future with a web application for the risk-specific filtering and evaluation of business plans of technology-based start-ups. A cloud-based knowledge and information system for IT-supported analysis and decision support, for example, can be developed for this purpose.