Corporate accelerator expansion gathers velocity

The corporate accelerator movement is gathering steam, about 50 delegates heard at our GCV Corporate Accelerator Unconference the day before Global Corporate Venturing’s main symposium. This interactive event was held at London’s Rainmaking Loft, base of operations for our event partner Startup Bootcamp. Best practices were shared among in-house corporate accelerator executives, independent accelerator managers who work with large corporations, and corporate venturing and innovation executives.

Unconference coordinator Trevor Owens, founder of Javelin, and senior corporate executives from the corporations such as Microsoft, Unilever, BMW and UPS, brainstormed with other attendees, some from accelerators such as 500 Startups and Cable Labs. The three-hour afternoon session generated multiple thoughts on what could be done to ride the upward trend in corporate acceleration.

GCV Analytics and training organisation Kauffmann Fellows presented initial findings on a joint research project which identified 106 in-house corporate accelerators, up 20% over the past year. There are also many more independent accelerators working widely with corporations, and many in-house corporate accelerators which are under the radar, keeping a low profile in the public domain, as was discussed on the day.

These numbers look set to rocket. Zack Weisfeld, general manager of Microsoft Ventures Global Accelerators, said after the unconference: “It is amazing to see how many top CVCs are planning to open an accelerator.”

Weisfeld sparked one of the key debates of the event as he laid out Microsoft’s “scalearator” model of corporate acceleration in a keynote – it seeks to be the “glue” between a seed-funded startup on its way to raising series A funding, rather than working at an early stage. This squares with audience comments during the day that more standard accelerator cohorts often operate at too early a stage for large corporations to understand how to engage.

Andy Shannon, head of global operations at host accelerator Startup Bootcamp, stimulated a sharing of the pain in the corporate-to-early-stage startup collaboration, as he laid out the difficulties in finding corporate partners to engage with startups. He and the audience shared multiple stories about the churn in corporate executives working with startups, and how hard it was to advise fast-moving early-stage entrepreneurs on extracting value from a relationship with corporations.

John McIntyre, of Kauffmann Fellows, who presented The Changing Shape of Venture Capital Markets, a report produced with GCV Analytics, also shared his experiences, having run the Citrix Startup Accelerator, now shut down. This led to discussion about how to make corporate accelerators a long-term phenomenon, as many last only three to four years or even less, as management engagement subsides.

Bruce Dines, of Liberty Global Ventures, explained why Liberty and its subsidiary, Virgin Media, had created the Virgin Media accelerator in conjunction with TechStars, in an example of the powered-by model of acceleration.

D-Raft, a central and eastern European accelerator, another partner of the event, moderated a panel with Weisfeld, Jeremy Basset, of Unilever Foundry, a startup engagement business of the Anglo-Dutch consumer goods company, and UK-based research agency Nesta.

Delegates also heard from other independent executives, such as Henry Lane Fox, of Founder’s Factory, which revealed it looks to engage only with corporations that have CEO-level involvement in the factory, and Liberty Mawhood, of L Marks, who explained how it was developing accelerators for companies such as UK retailers John Lewis and Top Shop.

GCV chief operating officer Tim Lafferty interviewed Cassandra Harris, of startup factory VentureSpring, who talked about its partnership with corporates such as IBM.