3iL Incubator and Entrepreneurship

Your National Student-Entrepreneur Status: how it works

The National Student-Entrepreneur Status (SNEE) is available throughout France, at any of the 33 PEPITE centres across the country. It enables you to build and develop your project with genuine support behind you. To obtain it, the selection committee at your local PEPITE centre will assess your application and grant you the status based on your motivation and the quality of your project.

Once you have this status, you can enrol in the D2E programme, which can enable you to:

• to earn ECTS credits;
• to validate your entrepreneurial project instead of doing an internship;
• to gain recognition in the job market;
• to extend your eligibility for scholarships.

Take your first steps, without putting everything on the line straight away

You don’t need to have a fully developed project to get started. The Pépite de Limoges program offers competitions and awareness-raising activities to help you take your first steps as an entrepreneur: FallCamp, Dave’s Weekend, Wintercamp.

If you’d like to take things a step further, there are two larger-scale competitions that offer a fully immersive experience in setting up a business :

• Pépite Étudiant-Entrepreneur: a national support scheme for setting up a real business, where you develop your project under real-world conditions, with the National Student-Entrepreneur Status (SNEE) as the reward.
• Pépite Campus Entrepreneur : a virtual business start-up scheme, where your project can be fictional, with no obligation to register with the SNEE.

There are two ways to explore entrepreneurship, depending on whether you want to take the plunge or check the waters first.

At 3iL, you’re not on this adventure alone

3iL Ingénieurs is a partner of the IAE, a university-level management school, which runs the PEPITE Limoges project. Our school strongly encourages its students to embark on entrepreneurial ventures, particularly through the ‘Innovate/Entrepreneur’ Days, organised each year to raise your awareness of the process of setting up a business, introduce you to the PEPITE programs and competitions, and give you the opportunity to meet alumni who have themselves set up their own businesses.

• you will be supported by a dedicated mentor if you take part in entrepreneurship awareness competitions (Dave’s Weekend, Wintercamp, etc.);
• A mentor will support you throughout your time on the Pépite Campus Entrepreneur programme, right up to the presentation of your project to the PEPITE jury;
• your course is structured to enable you to take part in the workshops and coaching sessions that form part of the student-entrepreneur program;
• your end-of-course work placement may be carried out as part of your business project, provided it is currently in the incubation phase;
• ECTS credits may be awarded for this type of project, which requires a significant amount of effort, thereby enabling you to complete the ‘Personal and Participatory Engagement’ module in the 3rd and 4th years.

A dual skill set to avoid being at the mercy of business management

Having a good technical idea is just the start. Knowing how to manage it, finance it and scale it up is a different skill, equally essential. That is why 3iL Ingénieurs offers a dual degree in Business Management, in partnership with IAE Limoges.

This Master’s program enables you to acquire managerial, accounting and financial skills to complement your scientific and technical training. If you are in the second or third year of the Engineering Program, you can follow this specially tailored two-year course and, in addition to your engineering degree, obtain the Master’s in Business Administration from IAE Limoges.

Resources that go beyond an office and a cup of coffee

What makes the incubator so strong is its direct access to the 3iL Group’s internal resources: research professors specialising in Big Data, AI, robotics and cybersecurity; our laboratories and a data centre equipped with GPUs; intern business knowledge (finance, communications, HR, corporate relations); and a network (Innovation Club, 3iL Junior Enterprise, the 3iL and ISFOGEP alumni network).

In terms of facilities, you have access to a co-working space (16 places), a FabLab, an XR/VR Lab, a Robotics Lab, and an AI Lab. In terms of support, a pool of volunteer experts is on hand to advise you on finance, marketing, legal matters and strategy.

They’ve been there before

Today, the incubator is already supporting several concrete projects: 3 AM Solutions (the 3iL Group’s Junior Enterprise), HebergHub (a PEPITE-accredited company), 3iL NextGen (a student club dedicated to developing innovation projects), and Alveelia, led by an alumnus and dedicated to making cybersecurity accessible and raising awareness of the subject.

Do you have a question about your project or the application process? Contact the incubator team at incubateur@3il.fr.

You are never alone in the ecosystem

The 3iL incubator is linked to a genuine local and national ecosystem: academic partners (University of Limoges, IAE, ESC, ENSAD), organisations dedicated to innovation (CCI, competitiveness clusters, French Tech, AVRUL, Aliptic), local businesses and start-ups, student associations and alumni networks. So you’re not going it alone: you can draw on the existing network of support.

How to apply?

There are two possible ways to join the incubator :

• If you are a student at 3iL, you can access it following your defence, on the recommendation of the experts from the ‘business plan’ module.
• Whether you are a student at 3iL, an alumnus, or the lead on an external project, your application is assessed on a rolling basis: send your application to incubateur@3il.fr (executive summary + pitch deck), attend an interview with the incubator team, and then present to a panel of experts (in technology, entrepreneurship, law, finance, marketing and strategy).

The selection criteria are as follows: any sector of activity, a technological or user-related innovation, and your motivation.

If your application is successful, you will sign a 12-month agreement, renewable up to 23 months. If you are participating in the incubator programme as a student or under the SNEE scheme, the support is free of charge. For graduates and external projects, a contribution is required to cover the incubator’s running costs.