Visualizing Toronto’s Business Incubation and Acceleration Landscape
Businesses can spring from many places of inspiration — academic, private, or non-profit.
In Toronto, there are countless ways to engage in community, business acceleration and incubation. Ranked among the top in the world, our institutions in this sector stimulate entrepreneurial growth and are shaping the companies of our future. In process
But what do these accelerators really do? Take a look and you’ll see specializations in fashion, social innovation, film, food and more. According to an interview in Harvard Business Review with Brad Feld, a cofounder of TechStars, “he likened the accelerator experience to immersive education, where a period of intense, focused attention provides company founders an opportunity to learn at a rapid pace. Learning-by-doing is vital to the process of scaling ventures, and the point of accelerators, suggests Feld and others, is to accelerate that process. In this way, founders compress years’ worth of learning into a period of a few months.”
Human Capital, Search Costs of Expertise, Signalling
Economically, human capital in startup business development is integral to success. At the microeconomic and macroeconomic level, human capital is key to economic growth of hosted companies. Accelerators act as an ecosystem for immersive education for startup employees from mentors, advisors, organizers, workshops in various areas of business from finance to marketing, and relationships with other hosted companies.
Businesses can spring from many places of inspiration. Academic, private, or non-profit approaches all lead to varying developments in your business. This immersion is generally tailored to goals of those governing the incubator or accelerator and signal to others in the field that a startup is cream-of-the-crop.
Source: City of Toronto Open Data
