5 Lessons Learned from Running a Product Accelerator

Authored by Anupam Kundu / Originally published at www.linkedin.com on April 2014.

Organizations across the globe, small and large, are outsmarted at the pace of adoption of new technology-enabled services by their customers and are looking for innovative avenues to stay ahead of the curve. Accelerators, Incubators, Pop-up Innovation labs are becoming popular hub with such enterprises, struggling to ship new products and create innovative business ecosystems on their own.

During the last nine months, I have been running a product accelerator service out of our NYC office. We have successfully launched 10 new products and services for organizations that range from a high end luxury retailer to a non-profit social venture providing access to museums to 50,000 low to medium income families in New York City. Our fastest concept-to-launch time for a new product has been 4 weeks; the longest was 12-weeks. Our clients include emergent intrapreneurial and entrepreneurial ventures in both the for-profit and non-profit space that want to leverage digital business channels to create sustainable product solutions out of emergent concepts.

Here are the top five lessons we have learned while delivering high quality products

• No Business is Too Big to Innovate.

Traditionally, large businesses are very slow to respond to market changes and usually get upended by start-ups spinning up new business models at high speed. However, in our experience, many big enterprises now have dedicated divisions that look out for emergent opportunities, buy new companies and grow businesses or grabbing strategic market share in new geographies. These organizations are not only buying out younger upstarts, but they are also investing heavily in offsite innovation labs, intrapreneurial ventures and skunk-works more than ever.

A couple of our early clients were ambitious intrapreneurs that secured seed funding from internal marketing budgets to innovate new service offerings for new clients. We have also received queries from a few large corporations to host their incubation hubs in our space and seed them with poly-skilled teams.

If you are a large organization, don’t let bureaucratic complexity stifle your innovative spirits.

• Social Ventures get Funding Love Too.

Today it doesn’t matter if you are a business with a social mission or a social benefit organization with a business model, funding flows your way if you are creating value in a sustainable way.

Lots of our non-profit clients have been exploring new business models to create continued value for their target population. And there is an increase in interest from angel funds and foundations to provide seed money to such ventures.

Very recently, we have been working with two social ventures funded by an NYC-based foundation for experimenting with mobile channels to increase their impact to the target demographics. These two organizations were selected from a large pool of applicants for their creative models around increasing the impact of their work using digital channels and unique ways to generate revenue and become sustainable.

• Building Products is a Social Game.

Creating products is not a game to be played alone.

The chances of market success are significantly boosted when a team of people with complementary skill-set come together to iterate on concepts and build a spectacular business. You need hustlers, designers, researchers, coders, project managers, party arrangers and obviously customers and users on your team. This doesn’t mean you need to have a big team; one person can play multiple roles depending on the context, however the point to make is that all these roles are essential to create a great product.

Product development is a team sport.

• Design is Critical to Product Success.

Today, if you want a great product, it needs to useful, usable and desirable.

This means that you cannot ignore design. Design is not just colors, gradients and shades, and fonts. Design is about focusing on creating something with user adoption in mind.

Products made with an adoption focus crack the market-product fit faster. At ThoughtWorks, the focus is on investing heavily in creating poly-skilled product teams with a strong orientation to experience design talent: the results for our clients have been tremendously fulfilling.

We cannot think of starting one of these many accelerator teams without experienced design thinkers and tinkerers.

• Not All Product Accelerators are Created Equal.

In a city that doesn’t sleep, there is no shortage of organizations or enterprising investors spinning up product accelerators, and all of them have different flavors.

Few accelerators will help you get from concept to launch without taking any equity, while others will not even entertain an idea without significant equity. Some are happy with just coaching on how to start a new venture, while others will charge you for co-working space. And then there are the ones that will help you actually research, design, develop, test, and deliver your product and get it out the door. So choose your accelerators wisely.

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Anupam Kundu is a polymath: business leader, innovator, visual thinker and dog lover based out of NY, USA.He is a passionate change catalyst and contributor to the Stretch hive-mind.