Announcing our corporate incubation program.
After 3 years of working with founders to move from concept to customer, FSAT Labs is expanding its world class incubation program to the corporate environment. This gives corporates the opportunity to participate in early stage incubation without having to set up infrastructure, hire staff, develop programs or develop the support network required to make it a success.
Reducing the risk.
The primary concern when engaging in early stage incubation is the amount of risk associated with working with a brand-new ventures, when these ventures’ failure rates are extremely high. However when looking into the reasons for failure, it comes down to:
No market need.
Ran out of cash/no funding.
Not the right team composition.
Our incubation program is designed to primarily mitigate these risks by helping founders build products that customers want (through applying lean principles in build-measure-learn loops), less waste by building the right stuff, applications for grant funding. relationships with early stage investor networks and experienced team to supplement the gaps within the founding team. This significantly reduces risk of working with the startup.
Alignment with the startup from day one.
Many corporates have steered away from incubation programs and have opted to work with startups that are further developed, typically having a live product and some customers. The key challenge of this approach is aligning innovation objectives of the corporate and the objectives of the startup.
The startup has developed its concept with a specific way of working and specific outcome in mind and while there sometimes exists an overlap between the solution and the corporate requirement, it mostly requires a pivot from the original concept the startup was working on. While not impossible, these pivots can be costly, time consuming and sometimes even fatal for a startup. This hinders progress of startup/corporate engagement and frustrate all around.
When a startup is sourced to solve a specific innovation challenge and with the guidance of an advisory board and startup coach, there is alignment between what the startup is trying to accomplish and that which the corporate requires from an innovation perspective. This means a large pivot in acceleration phase is less likely, saving costs and most importantly saving a significant amount of time.
Best of both worlds.
Corporates have customers, they have stable systems and processes that support their business operations and they have mature business models that generate relatively predictable revenue. These are but some of the things that could significantly help the startup on their journey of product development. A startup could benefit greatly by getting access to a target customer segment in order to pilot a project. This helps the customer obtain early stage quality customers that fit the target market, get feedback and fast track their product market fit development.
On the other hand. compared to corporates, startups have incredible agility. They have the capability to make decisions fast, they can afford to fail and accumulate learnings significantly faster.
Corporates with an early stage incubation program can get the benefit of agility and creativity of startups without exposing themselves the associated risks of building such businesses.
Our corporate incubation program.
Our program runs in three phase:
Innovation definition and sourcing (1 month) : We help you define the challenges you would like to solve through innovation and then source founder/startups to build ventures that would solve those challenges.
Incubation program (4 months) : Develop the startups from concept to customer through our designed interventions, coaching sessions and workshops.
Pre-Acceleration (2 months) : We get the startup ready to fund the next phase and/or get ready to launch a pilot with the corporate.
For more information on our corporate incubation program and how you can accelerate your innovation efforts, click here.