Designing the Successful Corporate Accelerator

CHAPTER 3A COMPLEX MACHINE TO A SIMPLE MACHINE

Innovation theories and tools are great but mean nothing if you can't actually put them into practice. As Ava Lopez knows well from her days as a venture capitalist, execution is all that matters. Although it's always difficult to blaze a trail and do something new, for startups the limitations are around resources – mostly time and money. This is certainly challenging, but startups are nimble and can figure out how to operate within these constraints. In fact, limited resources are often what make startups think in innovative ways and beat competitors who have bigger budgets and larger teams.

Corporations are much more complex and are usually limited by factors such as culture, process, bureaucracy, talent, and competing internal priorities. FabCo is no exception. But the ability to implement innovation initiatives, such as a simple accelerator program, can seem achievable without too much friction. It's just a three-month program, right? Any executive with project management experience and a little knowledge about tech startups should be able to put this together with their eyes closed, right?

Not quite. The accelerator program itself is one thing, achieving the desired results is another. And why do one without the other? If your goal for an accelerator, for example, is partnership, there are a lot of institutionalized processes, ...