I see the corporate accelerator or incubator as a dividing line. There is a « before » and an « after », because it is a question of renewing the factory of innovation: how can we innovate more quickly in the face of competition, in a way that is visible to customers, with a performance objective for the company, capitalising on the inventiveness of start-ups? This theoretical formulation becomes quite quickly… How do we do it? and that’s where things become (in hindsight) fun…

Understanding this question necessarily involves the same type of players: managers, marketing or business unit managers, product managers, engineers, and also our friends in communications. These players, who are naturally at the heart of the company’s business generation, are just as naturally indirect stakeholders for the corporate accelerator or incubator. All these actors constitute a socio-organisational microcosm and influence each other through many interactions that I mentioned in a previous post. The corporate accelerator or incubator as an architect of interactions… in a microcosm.

This microcosm will benefit the corporate incubator or accelerator, once the latter understands that it has no choice but to instil changes in its operating modes to transform the mindset of the actors (micro-cultures) and, by capillarity, the culture of the group. It is therefore surprising to hear so often from corporate accelerator or incubator managers that the latter is not a tool for organisational transformation. There is no doubt that there is a desire to assert the business and therefore operational character of the incubator or corporate accelerator. Isn’t the HR mission often wrongly considered as functional? This rejection of a more global vision of the corporate accelerator or incubator seems old-fashioned to me. The incubator or corporate accelerator as an organisational transformer is obvious once we admit that transversely is an indispensable element in today’s business and all missions have their place in it.

In my opinion, digital technology has also broken down the walls between missions within organizations, and there is more to come. Any system, whatever it is, can only claim to be able to exercise its art, its purpose, by deploying or capitalizing on related skills, which were useless yesterday and are indispensable today. Opening the black box of the accelerator or the corporate incubator can help to discover the areas of work that need to be implemented in order to make this essential transition in organizations a success… We’ll talk about it again…