Designing the Successful Corporate Accelerator

CHAPTER 6KNOW YOUR WHY

Source: Simon Sinek¹

An important place to start your accelerator journey is understanding the reason for launching an accelerator program at all. Often an accelerator manager is simply tasked with creating or managing the program, without a full understanding of what the parent company is trying to achieve. This is a one-way ticket to failure.

In order to select the right model of accelerator that achieves your desired outcomes, knowing the why is critical. A corporate executive should already know the overall business goals of the company as a whole, likely based on an annual strategic planning process. How are the innovation goals aligned? The more in sync the innovation and accelerator goals are with the annual and multi-year strategic plans, the more likely the program is to succeed.

The prominence of the goals within the wider business should align with your available budget and resources. For example, if innovation is one of the top three stated corporate goals, but you do not have capital or adequate resources allocated to run your accelerator program, then there is an obvious disconnect. For something more tangential like growth or something related to product improvements, this can influence the way you build the accelerator to support this goal. Try to make the accelerator a meaningful part of the parent company's overall strategic goals.