Goodbye, Jaguar Land Rover Incubator. Hello, Jaguar Land Rover Innovation Labs.

There was a time, not so long ago, when Portland had a plethora of incubators and accelerators. Corporations, organizations, and venture capital were all part of the family of accelerators designed to help early stage companies in Portland. And while the number of accelerators is only a fraction of what it was, the learnings from those efforts are creating new and different entities. Like the new Jaguar Land Rover Innovation Labs.

By being an incubator program we learned that the greatest successes for both parties came when we were able to operate like an innovation program and move into the proof of concept process quickly. That happened when we worked with companies whose products and technologies were ready to be integrated.

Through examining our successes we came to fully understand that focusing on our unique selling point — vehicle integrations — gave us the ability to deliver the greatest returns to our startups and internal stakeholders. With hundreds of accelerators and incubators around the world excelling at what they do, we weren’t going to let anyone down by making a shift in our program. So we set about doing just that.

For more information, see the Jaguar Land Rover post on the new incarnation.

(h/t Josh Carter)

Originally published at siliconflorist.com on May 1, 2018.