What Accelerators, Incubators, And Hackathons Tell Us About The Future Of
Business
Ten years of
innovation, lesson No. 9: Small doesn’t mean low impact.
If you’ve had a chance to watch the
HBO series Silicon Valley, you’ve had a taste of the newfangled
business-building apparatus known as the incubator: Jam a group of misfit
techies into an awkward locale, and see what genius (and absurdity) emerges.
It's easy to underestimate incubators. To make a joke out of
hackathons. To see accelerators and coworking spaces as passing fads. But to do
so misses a larger point: These formats and processes, which have emerged out
of tech culture over the past decade, offer a glimpse into the future of
businesses—and only the foolhardy would ignore them.
Take hackathons. These group-sprint efforts by software engineers
began as a way to attack difficult problems on tight deadlines. ("Okay
team, we have 24 hours to get a prototype of this product up and running:
Go!") The term hackathon has been stretched, and even satirized, to apply
to other types of groups and projects. (Creative agency Cultivated Wit even
produces "comedy hackathons.") What hackathons really represent,
though, is a philosophy of execution: A small group of people, working in a concerted
way, can get a tremendous amount done, provided they are willing to accept a
less-than-perfect "minimum viable product." Suddenly, speed takes
precedence over perfection. Suddenly, continual iteration becomes not only
acceptable but required. Constant change becomes part of the equation.
Incubators and accelerators like Y
Combinator have demonstrated how powerful these approaches can be. The list of
companies that have come out of Y Combinator include Airbnb, Reddit, Stripe, Dropbox, Twitch, Cruise, and hundreds more.
As for coworking spaces, they are a
reflection of both changing career definitions—are we really going to work for
the same company for 40 years?—and a recognition that interaction with people
engaged in diverse and often unrelated fields can stimulate creativity and help
problem solving. Plus, people of all stripes and persuasions, in locations all
around the world, seem to like them (as represented by WeWork’s quickly expanding global footprint).
The concept is a hit.
All of this wraps into an even larger business conundrum. As enterprises
scale, as cultures become entrenched, it’s harder and harder for innovation and
creativity to flourish. This is why big companies like GE will put some of
their people into a coworking space, or why a growing ad agency like R/GA
regularly launches accelerator programs (often in partnership with even larger
institutions). Can an enterprise be big and also agile? This is the ultimate
unanswered question of 21st-century business.
Hackathons, accelerators, and
incubators have become part of the toolkit for companies, as leaders experiment
with the right formula for systematically building agility into their
operations. The other tactic, of course, is to buy up smaller startup
businesses and inject them into an organization, using that energy and ethos to
counteract bureaucratic impulses. Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram
and WhatsApp can be seen as both shrewd
portfolio-building and shrewd culture-building. Plus it creates a real-life
storyline for Silicon Valley to parody.
ROBERT SAFIAN
https://www.fastcompany.com/3068304/most-innovative-companies/what-accelerators-incubators-and-hackathons-tell-us-about-the-futu
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