How to run ‘1-hour incubators’

If you are an advisor, coach, mentor, facilitator, or investor, chances are you have a lot of conversations with innovators (entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs). A lot of these conversations end up being “great” or “interesting”, with you offering lots of feedback and innovators scribbling loads of notes. There is always a nagging question, is this productive? If one defines productive as leading to significant change in the innovators’ actions after your meeting.

Recently I was asked to deliver a session for a global innovation conference in Mexico, I declined. In part, because in my past life (with the title, Director of Innovation) I failed to have brought any meaningful change with conference style “talking at you” sessions. Contrast this with having supported 56 internal and external startups through an 8-week program, where I’ve had really great results.

Instead of a blanket NO to the organisers. I decided to run an experiment, to condense an 8-week program into a personalised, ‘1-hour incubator’.

It was delivered to a wide variety of innovators — some at the idea stage, some struggling with sales, some looking to optimise a specific part of their user adoption to reach scale goals, and some were developing a new product or service.

I ran more than 24 hours of these ‘1-hour incubators’ over three days — half the time listening and half the time talking. Here is one structure to maximise value for both parties in that 1-hour:

5 minutes — their story on why the innovators do what they do.

10 minutes on the 4P’s (blue shaded boxes of the innovation canvas) to understand the innovators’ context very quickly. Specifically, the ‘Problem’ they want to solve, the ‘Purpose’ of why they exist, which ‘People’ are in their execution and advisory team, and their ‘Proposition’ which is a quick check of why we’re even having this conversation.

15 minutes: Then spend fifteen minutes, to take a snapshot view of the ‘innovation canvas’ (the inner white area in the above image), which looks to understand who their customers are, their understanding of their customers’ needs, their value proposition — then their solution, how they’re moving their customers/user through the change funnel, and finally revenue, costs and key metrics their measuring and going after.

So in the first 30 minutes, you are largely asking questions and noting down their answers reserving your judgment and input. In the last 30 minutes, it is your turn to talk.

20 minutes: With limited time, the aim is not to go deep dive into any one of the boxes of the innovation-canvas, but to help the innovators in two areas:

a) Use the context of 4P’s to build intelligent constraints that guide their decision making. Plus, once you know their context better, you’re more likely to contextualise your advice and hypotheses.

b) Help them form new relationships in their thinking, by looking at the relationships between the boxes. It’s these relationships that help illuminate (very fast) their lack of clarity, holes in their thinking, inconsistency in their narrative, where the different parts are working against each other, or hindering their ability to create a model that amplifies itself.

Problem: If it’s an external startup, it can particularly useful to help innovators see the difference between the ‘problem’ and the customer ‘need’ they’re solving for. The problem can be more system-level that no one person necessarily owns (hence why it’s not solved for), or was the root/origin (story) of the innovator embarking on their idea/startup. If it’s an internal startup, the problem can be related to the inner issues at the organisation. For example, slow revenue growth, a high level of churn, or lack of digitisation to drive better value propositions. Whatever it is, it’s important to understand the ‘problems’ because when they don’t align with the ‘purpose’, this is a red/orange flag.
Purpose: Some of the times the innovators had a clear problem definition, but could not define to what end they exist i.e. lacking a strategic intent to their purpose. For example, with one startup, they didn’t know if they were a product company, a toy company, a learning company, or a relationship building company. Depending on which purpose they choose, the solution and the whole canvas (business model) can look very different.

Helping the innovators see the problem-purpose fit is really key. In some cases the problem is so huge, but their purpose was very small. Without a compelling purpose, they will struggle to sell to internal and external investors.

People: Helping these teams see the weaknesses in their problem-team fit can be particularly helpful. The innovators usually have a core team but they’ve not proactively designed their virtual team of advisors, coaches, mentors, stakeholders in the before-during-and-after their problem definition — who can all bring a different perspective and time commitment. Helping the innovators realise they need to work on the socialisation of their idea, particularly inside big organisations, is critical to the success of moving from an idea to an approved project. If it’s an external startup, this designing of the team is key because their early customers can come from this team or the team’s networks.
Proposition: Helps you understand why you’re having the conversation in the first place. What’s their immediate goal they want to get to, after having the conversation with you. For example, is it to get their first customer, raise £X in funding, or optimise their sales funnel to drive x% higher conversions. This is helpful so you can select specific boxes on the innovation-canvas to focus on, and provide introductions which allow the innovators to test very specific hypotheses you’ve co-developed in this 1-hour incubator.

Last 10 minutes: You should aim, as well as summarise for the innovators, the ~5 new hypotheses they can test, 2 new identified contacts they can test them with, a one-page view of their innovation-canvas, and maybe a promise of a follow-up session if they get their actions done.

And, finally…

The ‘1-hour incubator’ was a one-to-one session, offered to 2–4 team members. I’ve found that if you only support one person, there is a lot of ‘hoping’ that the dots connect. When at least 2 people from the core team have gone through your 1-hour incubator (and the hard questions it raises), it will more than likely live on as the seeds of intelligent-conflict have been planted and more likely to result in action.

This structure has worked really well. The feedback I received (“You truly were one of the most impactful components of this event”) has pushed my thinking on how I can scale these ‘1-hour incubators’ to more use-cases (not just at conferences or workshops). For example, linking the ‘1-hour incubators’ to existing ideation platforms, where companies have lots of ideas but find it hard to give feedback or evaluate the ideas quickly.

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Next:

In a separate blog, I’ll go into more detail about the common failures of innovators as they communicate their internal workings of the innovation-canvas. For example, I saw many startups who potentially have a great solution but there is little to no solution-change fit. Startups forget (or don’t realise) they are in the business of change. They’re trying to sell a solution or one that requires multiple stakeholders to sign-off (e.g. in the B2B context), without helping their customers move through the change funnel — creating an urgency for change, creating a micro-commitment opportunity, which leads to them delivering some value first, before asking (and helping) them become an internal champion, and finally creating the demand (rather always be selling hard).

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Thank you for reading. Please like or share this blog if:

a) there is any value or new insight here for you so that others in your network can find it.
b) you’d like to see the next part to this blog. I will go into more detail about the ways in which you can help innovators see the misalignment in their solution-value fit, solution-change fit, or value-revenue fits.

By: Zevae M Zaheer