The Venture Building handbook is built with the intent of providing a toolkit for venture owners and managers on the one hand, and venture builders in makerspaces on the other hand, in the process of creating successful, scalable businesses. The theme of venture building creates room for business growth and various dimensions of innovation. At GreenTec Capital Partners, this idea of venture building was introduced as a solution to address an identified gap within the African startup ecosystem – the lack of access to the requisite skills and to actively provide mentorship and the limited capital from startups to materialize their vision. Venture building also addresses the needs of the investor ecosystem and fosters the opportunity of co-investment that ensures the quality of the execution. Furthermore, the low share of funding the continent attracted as well as the rapid rate of failure of newly founded businesses added to the importance of such a mechanism. This toolkit is a useful reference point for piecing together the basic building blocks of efficient execution. This way, companies can be sure that there is a structured foundation upon which other organizations can contribute to the business idea and harness it into a profitable, sustainable, investor-worthy enterprise.

This material can thus be used by four core stakeholders in the venture building ecosystem: startup founders and his/her team, investors, builders, makerspaces. It provides an overview of the thematic areas required by each of these stakeholders in venture building and attempts to provide guidelines and some templates. The materials presented are intended more to provide the entrepreneur with a frame for self-reflection, personal and corporate development than as a help to develop a specialization in any of the specific areas presented. As such, it is important to complement the knowledge provided herein with a combination of subject-matter expertise and a combination of mentoring and coaching.

There is still the need for more descriptive research into the specific challenges of African startups in solving their quest for better, bigger, globally competitive startups and business. Organizing a feedback loop will also help to improve the effectiveness of this handbook, and future versions, to ensure that it evolves at the same time as the ecosystem. This material is also a reference point for the Train-the-Trainer program because of the adaptability of the framework that helps the user to coordinate his/her knowledge with the existing needs of the startups. Upon approval for publication, use and circulation by the EU Commission, this document will be published and made available on all appropriate channels including social media.