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Self Assessment Tool

Influenced by and based upon the Checklist, a short Self Assessment questionnaire has been developed. This kind of self assessment tool helps to provide the researcher with a first picture on his/her activities and “market” surroundings. The Self Assessment Tool provides more qualitative data in order to assess the extend to which important issues have been taken into consideration. The self assessment tool is used after the summary in order to check the prospects of the idea. This procedure may provide feedback for further improvement. In a way the self assessment is a preliminary stage before the Business Plan. The aforementioned steps will provide feedback to the researcher on which issues he/she might search in a greater extend to improve the success potential of the idea, and he/she might get hints on which aspects of the research idea can be improved in order for the uncertainties to be reduced before launching the innovation. Then (after the proof of concept) the researcher should consult the 3rd stage tools in order to form his final Business Plan.

For each of the three topics – technology, market and business issues, a series of 10 questions has been developed. For each question, you are required to assess yourself by giving a mark between 0 and 4:

Mark	Explanation
0	You do not have any elements to answer the question. It probably means that you have not considered this point yet at this stage.
1	Your level of information / degree of preparation is clearly insufficient. There are major issues that remain unaddressed.
2	You have addressed the question and have probably identified the main issues but your level of information / degree of preparation still presents some gaps.
3	Your level of information / degree of preparation is close to completeness. There are only some points that remain to be dealt with.
4	You have thoroughly studied this aspect and are confident that your level of information / degree of preparation is fully satisfactory.

The result of your self assessment will reflect your answers in a scoring table. The aim of the self assessment exercise is not to give a final judgement on your research hypothesis but much more to display its degree of maturation in terms of a business idea. The tool shows areas you need to investigate in order to come up with a sound business idea. The Gate2Start self assessment tool can be used as a stand alone tool in order to get an overview of the strengths and weaknesses of a research idea as a business proposal. It can also be used as a discussion basis between researchers/research teams and advisors that will help them build a valid business proposal.