Designing accelerators and corporate venture programs — some new ideas

Introduction

I come to accelerators, incubators, and innovation programming from two angles. Having been involved in the startup sector for years, I was interested in the development of accelerators, so back in 2014 I set up my own one. It was a specialist healthcare program focussing just on eye-care, called EyeFocus. It mixed elements of traditional commercial accelerators with corporate accelerators and social impact programs.

EyeFocus was backed by Bayer Healthcare and Zeiss, made investments, and ran a bootcamp program. It also supported some social enterprises and very early stage teams, and it focussed more than usual on building what we called ‘the eye-care innovation ecosystem.’ This meant that it not only focussed on making money, but also on creating value for the wider ecosystem,* working with non-profits, universities, and hospitals, and aiming to leave that ecosystem better connected as a result.

It was not directly a corporate venture program because it was owned and run by me, rather than being run by me as an employee of a corporate owner. However, it was focussed on connecting a leading pharma company and hardware company into the startup space to promote their engagement with innovators. In that sense, the aims were closely tied to corporate…