Innovation Program — Getting Started

I love to help innovation programs get started, though it is a big challenge currently as there is no framework choices to choose from.

Every company tries to adapt differently depending on their beliefs and understandings.

At Team Coaches we focus our time on improving and creating the best experience for this programs to identify how best suit all the needs.

Step 1: Define what services to offer

As the first step on the creation of the program, you need to define what services you want to offer. In general the list consists of:

• Education
• Workshops
• Program Management support
• Mentoring
• Coaching

Step 2: Setting up the platform — Info Page

On the Info page you need to define and explain an all-in-one information page which can explain at least most of the following items:

• Welcome video (This is the best welcoming but you can use other ways to welcome the team)
• Program support team
• Program structure
• Startup expectations
• Fine Print (explain when the startup will be out of the program if they don’t do x or y)
• Deals offering for the startups

In many cases, program teams believe that the landing page or other places or document shared are enough to provide a guideline for startups. We have found that in most cases people forget and they need to come back to an easy resource in one common place.

Step 3: Create your Education Program

This is one of the most difficult parts in an innovation program. We have found that the most efficient programs which are based only onEducation have Education Program Manager or similar role responsible to create and update their programs.

I will create another blog post with examples that can be re-used depending on the needs, but here we will have some questions to answer.

Structure: is the program structured in a way that you need your cohort to follow steps?

Duration: how long are you planning to run this education program? What is the engagement needed from your startups? Are you looking for fast or easy pace?

Lectures: have you created enough content to share? Do you need to look for online resource? Make sure that those videos are not trademarked.

Step 4: Workshops

This is one of the most values added to the innovation programs. Workshop are not only presenting a lecture but interacting with your audience.

Creating workshops need focus on these items:

• Presentation (some visual focus with minimal amount of words, this needs to be supporting your speech)
• Workbook (in some cases it is interested to share workbook with the people joining to support their learning)
• Resources (additional resources when your audience can check more out about some specific topic)
• Actions (make sure to provide a list of actions items to your audience)

While creating the workshops you need to make sure that the following information is provided before hand:

• Agenda
• Resources

For each workshop you should be able to collect rating and make sure your audience can consult your workshop data.

Step 5: Program Management support

Program management covers all the operations and projects guidelines that are defined for the startup to join the cohort program to achieve the objectives that are there.

There are few things that needs to be clear here. How the program will run, some of the questions that needs to be clear are:

• What is the stage of the cohort?
• Do we follow-up daily, weekly or monthly with the startups?
• Do we create a plan with the startup or are startups independent to create their own?
• Do we define achievements for each startup?

To track and measure this you need to have the following tools available for your startups or your startups should be using something that can share and send you reports:

• Task Management (Project management software)
• Metrics
• OKRs
• Documents and notes storage with shared capabilities
• Calendar

Step 5: Mentoring

Mentoring is one of the most important reason people join innovation program. To have the opportunity to get advise from expert in different area.

For your program you need to defined the way that you will provide this service.

These are some of the most important that you need to do defining your program:

• Paid or voluntary mentor: both options have their pros and cons.
• Areas that mentors need to cover.
• Estimated time that mentors needs to spend with your startups.
• Availability
• Quality of your mentors based.

Step 6: Coaching

This is the last item that we are covering, as a difference with a mentor a coach addresses and guide your startups from all the process within the program.

It is always important to define who are these coaches. They can be external people supporting your program but they need to make sure they are listening enough to get all the needs from yours startups and being able to guide them to get what they need to do.

Coaches don’t need to be experts in areas but have enough inside to guide them.

Team Coaches works for you

Team Coaches provide a software that contains all the tools require to simplify and unify all the activities in one place and can help corporation to implement this concept and run with it during in the Accelerator Program.

If you like our product you can book a demo and we can talk about how we can fit in your programs.