Lean Mentoring: Fitting external support to entrepreneur needs over the startup development cycle to make better use of mentorships

Mentoring and coaching can play a crucial role in the growth and development of innovation-based ventures and are vastly adopted by Science and Technology Parks and Areas of Innovation, in order to better prepare entrepreneurs on their endeavors. Despite their relevance, few researches investigate the effectiveness of such practices. Based on this, we conducted an exploratory research by means of a focus group with agents from a Southern Brazilian innovation ecosystem. As main results, we could observe a blur on the definitions of mentoring and coaching, as well as opportunities for improvement in the implementation of mentoring processes. Finally, we propose a further investigation of a lean mentoring approach, delivering the right amount of knowledge to entrepreneurs at the right time.