Innovation programs differ depending on the structure and what they want to provide to their supported startups. Furthermore, naming can be confusing when looking at their web sites, e.g. A lot of Venture Capital firms are adding an accelerator or a startup studio to find quickly and being more involved from the beginning with the companies.
Understanding the mission is the main point to start evaluating these programs, but in general there is a common theme.
Program Mission is to support the build, scale, and growth of startups in return a conversion rate on initial investment.
To know more you can read our post that goes into more details between programs here.
Structuring your programs helps you to have the first steps to build a successful innovation company.
One of the first steps is to create a clear role structure in the organization so your startups don't get confused about how the program is run and give the easy path for a quick answer to all their questions (one of innovation program's key goals).
Roles:
- Staff: a team of admins to handle all coordination with companies and handling the community
- Coaches: the team that helps unlock a person's potential to maximize their own performance.
- Mentors: internal or external experts in certain areas to support companies with their experiences by building trust and modeling positive behaviors.
- Investors: the people that help with money, contacts and support marketing your company.
- Entrepreneurs: founders, co-founders, or even employees of the companies in the community.
- Corporate partners: the support circle of other companies that invest, supports, and help to close customers and agreements for faster growth.
Role names will vary depending on the mix that the program managers are trying to create with their entrepreneurs.
How do Team Coaches help their customers?
Team Coaches helps to structure the program and adapts to your needs, identifying and assigning role functions to users, so that a structure is defined from the beginning.
This also works for long-time programs that have their own definition of roles.
If you want to know more please book a demo here.
