Prospective Mentoring and Leadership Guidance

The video game sector continues to experience rapid growth and to evolve into a mature industry.
With it comes the expectation of solid entrepreneurship and business development. The path to
economic growth usually leads from a start-up phase to building a successful and stable company, and
if capital flow depends on equity and VC investments, then it will eventually need to result in an exit.
Consultants, incubators, accelerators, mentors, trainers, business development advisers, there is a
whole range of support on this trajectory from start-up to exit. The spectrum of skills required for this
type of support is vast and not self-evident. As part of our efforts in the BSG Go! project, we attempted
to collate and categorize the whole set of mentoring skills in a matrix.1 Speaking of mentor skills:
ultimately the mentor transfers their business development knowledge to a start-up, i.e. a team lacking
entrepreneurial skills. When these young entrepreneurs gain experience and grow their business, they
in fact need to take on the role of the mentor, both in developing their business strategies, plans and
practices and also in guiding their teams, thus transferring in turn entrepreneurial skills to (some of)
their “young” game developers. With the gained experience and skills, these turn into senior managers
and act as “in-house” mentors or team leads, and sometimes they even become mentors to start-ups.

In addition to the skills matrix, the BSG Go! partner Dania Games2, the incubator of Dania Academy, in
Grenå, Denmark, developed a tool to guide both start-ups or (in-house) teams and mentors or (in
house) team leads along the trajectory from start-up to growth and if envisage, also exit.
This “Game Start-up Status Board” provides both groups with a means to monitor and assess the
progress of the individual steps along the trajectory, thus also providing milestones as a basis for a
breakdown of individual tasks to be done (e.g. in the form a Kanban board) to reach the next milestone.
As such the tool is as much a monitoring tool for mentors and team leads/CEOs, as it is a compendium
of milestones along the evolution of a company and a basis for assigning management tasks along the
trajectory of the business development.

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