Rethinking Accelerator and Incubator Programs

Rethinking Accelerator
and Incubator Programs

A cornerstone of many social entrepreneurship education initiatives is some form of accelerator or incubator program typically designed to help “incubate” or “accelerate” the growth of participating social enterprises. Rather than taking a systems orientation, most of these programs are designed around an organizational growth framework, overlooking the opportunity to “accelerate” the participants impact through initiatives that might not equate to organizational growth. Some programs are agnostic about the organization’s legal form, while some accept only non-profits or only businesses, yet most tend to focus at the organizational level: they provide support to start or grow a social impact organization. In our exploration of systems change, we have noted that not all change comes from growing social ventures, and that when supporting social ventures, skills beyond start-up training are necessary to support systems-led leadership. As such, we wanted to take a look at accelerator programs that moved beyond traditional start-up growth offerings. Here are a few we might all learn from:

The Epp Peace Incubator in the Kindred Credit Union Centre for Peace Advancement

The Epp Peace Incubator at Conrad Grebel University College in the University of Waterloo is not your average accelerator program. While most accelerators focus on how to grow an organization, the Epp Peace Incubator focuses on how to grow impact by working with and through government.

Some business programs treat government like it is something to work around: a regulating body that gets in the way rather than a key partner in scaling impact. “In peace building, government is never an afterthought,” notes Paul Heidebrecht, Director of the Kindred Credit Union Centre for Peace Advancement. The Epp Peace Incubator aims to help entrepreneurial teams better understand the various roles and functions of government, and then goes beyond their “Government 101” training by making key introductions to influential government officials. They have found that entrepreneurs who understand government and who have been supported in their introductions to officials, can then influence policy, work with government to procure their services, tackle regulatory hurdles, or help provide innovative ideas and overlooked perspectives directly into government conversations.

Visit the Epp Peace Incubator’s website and their submission to the Gallery Walk to learn more about their work.

School of System Change

Focused on people working with and within organizations, the School of System Change supports participants to skill-up with a wide range of systems change tools and approaches, from systems mapping and regenerative frameworks to systems leadership. The School is an initiative developed by Forum for the Future, an international sustainability charity focused on systems change. Having run a Masters in Leadership for Sustainability for twenty years, and seen sustainability education become mainstreamed over that time, Forum for the Future launched the School as a response to a growing need for training on systemic thinking and complexity. As one of a few programs explicitly focused on system change, the School attracts a wide ranging audience of change-makers and future leaders who are looking to develop a systems approach to complex challenges.

The School is designed to develop each individuals’ systems practice while helping them develop the ability to cultivate diverse perspectives through cohort-based learning in community with others who come from a range of fields, sectors, and cultural backgrounds. The School’s flagship program is called Basecamp because it seeks to introduce base systems practice in five core capability areas – systems diagnosis, strategy design, innovation for impact, collaboration and engagement, and leadership and learning. Over the course of six months, the participants are introduced to a curated range of tools and methodologies that they apply initially through a team-based fieldwork challenge, and then, with a peer-supported online environment, to their own work. With this spiral pedagogy, key contributors from across the field, and individual coaching, Basecamp is designed to support the growth of leaders, rather than organizations, with the hope that those leaders can then apply their accelerated systems perspective and skills to whichever roles they take on in the future.

Visit the School’s website to learn more about the School of System Change approach and what people are learning, and explore this collection of blog articles.

Uncharted

Formerly known as the Unreasonable Institute, Uncharted is an accelerator program based in Denver, Colorado. When under the brand Unreasonable Institute, the accelerator program was focused on scaling social impact ventures, selecting a cohort made up of a range of for-profit and non-profit organizations with various geographic and topical areas of focus, sourced from a competitive global pool. The application used to ask questions such as “How will your organization scale to reach 1 million people?”

As one of the most prominent global social impact accelerators, Unreasonable Institute was able to source some of the most exceptional organizations, but as they looked back on their impact and their methodology, they realized something was missing in their ability to “accelerate” this work. Timed with a rebranding to the name Uncharted, the organization now focuses not just on growing impact ventures, but taking on specific problems and social/environmental issues. In 2017 they ran a cohort focused on healthy food access in Denver’s urban food deserts. They did deep research into the drivers of food access, found for-profit and non-profit organizations that had proven models addressing those drivers, and then ran an accelerator focused on scaling and uniting organizations with the shared goal of increasing access to affordable, healthy food in low-income neighborhoods across Denver.

You can learn more about Uncharted on their website or visit this page to read lessons learned from their Denver based Food Access Accelerator.