Every entrepreneurial journey begins with a moment of possibility and uncertainty. At the ideation stage, founders are navigating assumptions they don’t yet know they’re making, and decisions that will shape everything that follows. Coaching here matters more than many realise. During our NCME November 2025 meeting, members explored how coaching needs to adapt as entrepreneurs progress from early idea generation to customer exploration and, ultimately, the startup stage. We were joined by two expert coaches in the ideation stage:
- Olivia Brown: Incubation Services Manager at Imperial’s Enterprise Lab, providing idea stage coaching and helping startup and spinout founders access mentoring and expert advice from a network of 200+ to navigate the critical early stages of venture building. Prior to this, Olivia spent over a decade in marketing and business development, leading global campaigns to attract clients, investment, and international business to London.
- Camille Reltien: A certified Co-Active Coach (CPCC) and entrepreneurship practitioner. She specialises in supporting high-performance individuals—particularly tech innovators and entrepreneurs. With a background in entrepreneurship education and community building at Imperial College London, Camille blends strategic insight with emotional intelligence to support her clients in achieving their goals and unlocking new perspectives.
The ideation stage is one of the most exciting and fragile moments in an entrepreneur’s journey, and, importantly, the start. Ideas are still forming, assumptions are untested, and founders are often navigating ambiguity for the first time. During our NCME meeting, several important themes emerged about what effective coaching looks like at this early stage. Below are the most essential practices for coaches supporting founders as they shape their first ideas.
1) Lead with conscious coaching, not mentoring
A key distinction in early-stage support is the difference between coaching and mentoring:
- Coaching helps founders think, reflect, and uncover their own assumptions.
- Mentoring provides advice, experience, and direct suggestions.
At the ideation stage, taking a primarily coaching led approach allows founders to articulate their ideas more clearly and understand their own reasoning. Coaches highlighted the importance of active listening and asking probing questions, rather than offering solutions too quickly. This prevents premature narrowing of the idea and encourages broader exploration.
2) Build opportunities for peer learning
One of the most powerful tools at this stage is peer feedback and normalising the idea that you should build your network of entrepreneurial contacts and embed yourself in entrepreneurial communities. While coaching is often expected to be 1:1/individual, group formats can also be powerful. In Imperial Enterprise Lab’s Idea Surgeries, three entrepreneurs share their ideas and offer feedback to each other, these forums normalise early-stage uncertainty while enabling founders to:
- Hear diverse perspectives
- Challenge assumptions
- Learn to give and receive constructive feedback
- Gain confidence talking about imperfect ideas
As valuable as peer forums are for widening perspectives, founders still need structure to make their thinking visible and testable. That’s where lightweight frameworks help.
3) Use frameworks to structure thinking, not to produce “right answers”
Simple tools such as the Idea Canvas, Business Model Canvas, and Where to Play frameworks help founders articulate:
- The problem being solved
- Early customer hypotheses
- Key assumptions to validate
- Initial value propositions
These are scaffolds, not scorecards. The goal is clarity, not perfection. Pair them with practical discovery resources (e.g., The Mom Test, Talking to Humans) so founders can test assumptions directly with potential users.
Even with the best tools, coaching isn’t one-size-fits-all. The founder in front of the coach may need something different.
4) Tailor your stance to the founder
Entrepreneurs arrive with varied backgrounds, confidence levels, and ways of thinking. Those with analytical or research training often respond well to parallels between scientific methods and business experimentation. Others may need reassurance, confidence-building, or help articulating ideas aloud for the first time. Effective coaches calibrate:
- The level of challenge vs. support
- When to stay non‑directive vs. when to signpost
- The pace of exploration vs. decision
Set expectations early. Be explicit about your role, how directive you might be, and any lenses you’ll bring (e.g., sustainability or impact), so founders understand what to expect.
Final thought & call to action
Early-stage coaching is about more than refining ideas, it’s about developing founders who can navigate uncertainty, think critically, and build confidence. As educators and coaches, our role is not to shape the idea for the founder, but to shape the founder for the problem they are trying to solve.