Support programmes for young ventures in incubators

New support programmes for scaleups are of a design that could easily be replicated in incubators and their ilk, and could help generate big steps in growth.

Incubators have been essentially providers of low cost accommodation for small businesses, but they are coming under pressure to be more active in the support of their growth and development.

The concept of the Accelerator has illustrated what can be achieved by orchestrated forms of support – at least for startups. And the recent Barclays report has suggested that some of those approaches might also be usefully applied to Scaleups, with the aim of nurturing some great businesses of the future.

New programmes for Scaleups (such as the Judge Institute’s Growth Builder programme (http://wp.me/p3beJt-fn) and the RBS/UCL Business Growth programme (http://wp.me/p3beJt-dK) have taken the form of periodic meetings for CEOs, usually monthly meetings over twelve months, and consisting of mutual discussions of their problems and opportunities, and learnings about the latest developments in the most relevant topics, such as the latest uses of social media and the latest sources of finance. The Belgian Plato programme (http://wp.me/p3beJt-dH) (widely franchised in other countries) and the Vistage programme from the US (http://wp.me/p3beJt-cb) now popular in the UK – both for cohorts of senior executives, both use a very similar format.

What is common to these programmes is:

*         the exchanging of experience

*         their regular but occasional meetings

*         their intimacy and confidentiality

*         their ability to bring together individuals with common issues or experience.

And surprisingly, their addictiveness.

Their participants are usually carefully matched – for sector, technology, markets, size or maturity.

Young businesses with high growth potential will often be found in incubators, co-working spaces and innovation centres, where it would not be difficult to set in motion programmes of this kind, which could give a major boost to their participants.

John Whatmore, October, 2016