Why your ecosystem is sick: Three diagnoses

Why Accelerators fail

Every community I talk to wants an accelerator or an incubator (and different people define those words differently). But the truth is that an awful lot don’t show much impact beyond a couple feel good stories and some vague statistics. 

I am often suspicious of tech founders who think that all the world runs on their operational model, but this article does a pretty good job of identifying some of the key factors in success or failure, including these: 

Why might said program NOT be impactful?

• They do try to help everyone OR (more likely) the program directors have an agenda or little startup experience – in either case, onboarding founders who are not likely to succeed. The danger in this is not that it would keep the rate of success lower; the issue being that startups and founders who shouldn’t be accelerated, take time, talent, and resources, AWAY from the ventures that might.

• Are they actually accelerating or are they just using that word? What would be required to “accelerate”? Probably, things like PR, marketing, capital, or even some development resources (be those software developers or business developers helping close partnerships). Let’s be blunt, if an “Accelerator” isn’t “Accelerating” then they are a drain on your startup community and they’re misleading founders and investors – likely contributing to a higher-than-average rate of failure.

• Most so-called Accelerators, I find, operate locally, and with the greatest respect to the good intention, a network of the ideal mentors, investors, or other resources for a startup are NOT within your neighborhood. Is the Accelerator actually connecting founders with EVERYONE most relevant to the startups or is it limited to the network of people preferred (or worse, who are paying to be involved… perhaps under the guise of “investing”).

The Entrepreneurial Community

“Community” is another one of those terms that we use a lot but don’t always mean the same thing. In this case, UNH Extension appears to be talking about an entirecommunity, not just a community of entrepreneurs. 

But the recommendations are good – and as I have often written before, we have a lot more potential entrepreneurs and innovators in our community than we think that we do. It’s just that those potential entrepreneurs and innovators have different skin colors and languages, they may not have degrees or letters after their names like we expect, and they might (gasp!) even have grease under their fingernails. 

Most importantly, this article identifies the potential of everyone in that community — and it indicates that they need more than a pitch night and a little check to activate that potential. 

Here’s a few that stood out to me:

Create a vested public: By working together, communities can engage a broader public that is vested in entrepreneurship. Community leaders can start by engaging businesses, institutions, and residents in discussion about key needs and opportunities for supporting entrepreneurial growth.

Provide opportunities for entrepreneurs to build off each other’s business ideas/ventures. Businesses that perform complimentary functions invariably add to each other’s productivity. As an example, a recreational fishing outfitter can help to draw tourists who might also purchase dried foods from a local grocery store. Communities can help to foster linkages between entrepreneurs to help them to capitalize on each other’s assets.

Provide of hands-on trainings and workshops to entrepreneurs and to community leaders: Cooperative Extension, Manufacturing Extension Programs, Business Incubators, Small Business Development Centers, and other entities, are often willing to sponsor and implement workshops to provide community leaders, as well as entrepreneurs, with the skills and tools for strengthening business and economic opportunities at the community level.

Invest in existing entrepreneurs: The best messengers to convey the importance of entrepreneurship as a strategy for building community wealth are the entrepreneurs themselves. By providing them with resources to be successfully, communities are actually creating good messengers who can draw from real-life experiences to convey to build the case for entrepreneurship.

Truth from the Tapestry of Black-owned busineses

I know that I have plugged this publication in these pages more than once. But it is still the single best source I know of for understanding the challenges that under-resourced entrepreneurs face – and they are not what you may expect. 

In my opinion, every single person who works with small businesses or entrepreneurship of any type should read this highly user-friendly report. Full stop.