Innovation accelerators for corporates.
In this page, you'll learn how to design a successful innovation accelerator, through examples, step-by-step guides, accelerator program templates and agendas. Create innovation programs that deliver cultural transformation, while growing your business.
Duration
3 - 6 months
GOAL
Cultural transformation and/or business growth
Business risk
Medium
ideal audience
Product managers, business managers
Definition
What is an innovation accelerator?
An innovation accelerator (or startup accelerator) is a growth program that provides support to a validated business concepts to scale fast. The support can be in the form of: resources (people and money), mentors, connections and knowledge. Find more definitions here and here.
There are 2 types of innovation accelerators:
- Internal accelerators (or corporate accelerators) are acceleration programs funded and run by corporations. Team members develop internal ideas in a given time, sometimes in exchange of equity (e.g. Google Ventures).
- External accelerators (or startup accelerators) are acceleration programs funded and run by public or private entities. Startups have a fixed time to show results in exchange of equity (e.g. Y Combinator, 500 Startups).
You may hear the word “incubator” too. Although being confused with “accelerator” at times, an incubator is a growth and mentoring program for not validated business concepts. Therefore, an incubator works with business concepts and pre-startups at an earlier stage than the ones that enter acceleration programs.
Goals
Why should you build a corporate accelerator?
Are you in a fast paced industry and need to speed up your time to market? Are you in a highly regulated industry, where developing new concepts is risky and cumbersome? Is your organization stuck in a lot of internal “checks and balances”? If so, your organization may be in need for an innovation accelerator. Here a some of the goals that it may help you achieve.
Build innovation capabilities within your organizations
An innovation accelerator needs a different set of skills, knowledge and experience. By implementing a business accelerator, your organization will build different capabilities that can easily inject in other functions.
Grow your business through innovation
Teams will develop new products and services at speed and urgency, which will increase your organization's results.
Promote entrepreneurship and attract talent
New generations are more and more demanding for spaces to build new concepts - this initiative will allow you to attract that unique talent.
Accelerator program
A step-by-step guide to build a successful startup accelerator.
How to build an innovation corporate accelerator? This is step-by-step guide to build a successful startup accelerator for corporates, based on our experience with our clients. We added links to external resources (you’ll find even more resources at the bottom of the page), so that you can build a business accelerator yourself. In case you need extra support, book a free consultation with us, contact us, or subscribe to the newsletter.
Step 1
Understand
Clearly define the challenge, expectations, resources and governance needed
Duration
2 weeks
GOAL
Understand the challenge and identify the ideal team members to tackle it
Key people
Board members, innovation managers
“If I had only 1 hour to solve a problem, I would spend 55 mins defining it, and only 5 minutes finding the solution” — Attributed to Albert Einstein.
Before launching the startup accelerator, we must understand what we want to achieve and how:
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Identify and prioritize the business challenges that we should address. Ideally, these should be uncertain and risky, different from Business As Usual.
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Reframe the business challenges selected: Who is the customer? What are their needs? What is the expected outcome? How are we going to measure success?
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Quantify and estimate resources: team members, skills, expertise, timelines and deadlines.
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Gradual investment: since we don’t know which ideas are going to succeed, we suggest to use a gradual investment approach, that is, teams will get investment based on results achieved. As a rule of thumb, each team should have a minimum of USD20,000 allocated (not assigned!)
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Governance: define a model to make investment and go/no-go decisions, conduct experiments, periodic reviews, discussions and mentorship to teams.
Additional articles
- Lean Startup in Corporations — How to apply Build-Measure-Learn at scale
- Minimum Viable Ecosystem — How to Kickstart your Corporate Innovation
- What Startup Accelerators really do — Harvard Business Review
- Accelerators, Incubators, and Innovation Labs — what’s the difference?
Best reads
- Getting to Yes! policy by Steve Blank
- Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) — How-to set OKRs including templates and examples
Best Podcasts
- Steve Blank podcast on innovation
Step 2
Problem space
Validating the problem and the customer before designing the solution.
Duration
3-4 weeks
GOAL
Validate a problem or need worth solving to our customers
Key people
Innovation managers, team members, governance board
“If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail” – Abraham Maslow.
The most important step for any idea development is understand and size the customer’s problem. Hence, it is critical to validate this before continuing with the solution:
- Size potential market (back of the napkin calculation): TAM, SAM and SOM
- Identify early adopters and draft a first version of their current needs and pains.
- Get to of the building! Conduct Customer Discovery interviews to validate your assumptions (previous point).
- Evaluate whether this is a pain worth solving, or it is just a complain. You can run several experiments to do this (see The Real Startup book link on the right).
- Identify the 3-5 most critical pains your customer values the most. The Real Startup book can help you on this.
Additional articles
- How to run successful experiments — How we help organizations run successful experiments
- Build-Measure-Learn — How we guide corporations in achieving the B-M-L loop.
Best reads
- TAM, SAM and SOM — What it means and how to calculate it
- The Real Startup book — How to run experiments to validate your business idea.
Best Podcasts
- StratChats by Strategyzer — Regular discussion on the future of business building.
Best videos
- Understanding the Job — Clayton Christensen explaining the Jobs to Be Done.
Step 3
Solution space
Identifying the best way to solve our customers problems/needs – mechanics and approach.
Duration
4 -5 weeks
GOAL
Identify the best solution in the form of a functioning pilot
Key people
Innovation manager, support functions, Governance board
“As an innovator, you must be a combination of observer and designer: you observe problems and needs, and you design solutions accordingly” – Innoway
In this phase of our innovation accelerator, we will focus on designing and testing different solutions to decide which one is the most adapted (and easier) to invest in the final step.
- Build a prototype. Develop the first version of the solution’s value proposition and set of features.
- Conduct solution interviews with early adopters to validate the features of the prototype.
- Test and iterate our first version with customers, until we have an optimized version ready to scale.
Additional resources
- Board of Innovation’s favorite ideation tools
- Innovation tools by Hyper Island
Step 4
Business model
Understand the feasibility and mechanics of the validated solution.
Duration
2-3 weeks
GOAL
Define how we will make money with our validated solution
Key people
Innovation Managers, team members, Subject Matter Experts
Once the idea has been validated, we will be in a better position to define the business model behind: revenues, resources needed, development and the like.
- Validate revenue streams and costs.
- Develop value exchange mechanics: process, checks and balances.
- Identify technology, activities and partners.
Best reads
- Business Model Generation — the global bestseller that introduced the Business Model Canvas to the innovation world
- The Business Model Sandbox Podcast — by the Business Innovation Factory
Step 5
Investment decision
Innovate like a startup, invest like a Venture Capitalist
Duration
3-5 weeks
GOAL
Allocate investment to the most promising concepts and integrate in the business
Key people
Investment Board, team members
Based on evidence, insights and data the organization makes investment decisions in a gradual way.
- Pitch. Build an elevator pitch, and present it to the organization. Include information about initial investment.
- Get a “go”. Get a sign-off from the management for the next 3-4 months.
- Periodic meeting for investment decisions based on results: Pivot, Persevere or Kill the project.
- Scale and integrate to the business: decide when and how to integrate the product or service to the rest of the organization.
Best reads
- HBR article — To innovate like a Startup, Make Decisions Like VCs Do
Best Podcasts
- Masters of Scale by Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn
- How I built this – Guy Raz dives into the stories behind some of the world’s best known companies.
You don’t quite know where to start? We offer 30-minute free consultation for CEOs, Innovation Managers, and Heads of Strategy.
Additional resources
Books, articles, videos and podcasts about innovation accelerators.
Books about corporate accelerators and innovation
- The Corporate Startup — by Tendayi Viki
- The Real Startup book — How to run experiments to validate your business idea.
- The Lean Startup — the Eric Ries’ international bestseller that made the lean methodology a global reference in the innovation field.
Articles about corporate accelerators and innovation
- A full guide to build a corporate accelerator — by HowDo
- Lean Startup in Corporations — How to apply Build-Measure-Learn at scale
- Minimum Viable Ecosystem — How to Kickstart your Corporate Innovation
- What Startup Accelerators really do — Harvard Business Review
- Accelerators, Incubators, and Innovation Labs — what’s the difference?
- Innovation Accelerator Playbook — A full guide to build an Innovation Accelerator by Board of Innovation
- Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) — How-to set OKRs including templates and examples
- Getting to Yes! policy by Steve Blank
- How to run successful experiments — How we help organizations run successful experiments
- Build-Measure-Learn — How we guide corporations in achieving the B-M-L loop.
- HBR article — To innovate like a Startup, Make Decisions Like VCs Do
- TAM, SAM and SOM — What it means and how to calculate it
Innovation podcasts
- Masters of Scale by Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn
- How I built this – Guy Raz dives into the stories behind some of the world’s best known companies.
- StratChats by Strategyzer — Regular discussion on the future of business building.
- Steve Blank podcast on innovation
- Future Squared — a podcast about corporate innovation and entrepreneurship by Collective Campus
- a16z — the Andreessen Horowitz’ podcast, discusses about everything innovation, from trends to technology advancements.
