Differences Between Incubators and Accelerators

1. Differences Between Incubators and Accelerators Let’s take a look at innovation, growth, expansion, and funding in brief and how making use of one of these programs can help your business. The UK is a country that hosts business incubators and accelerators. Each autonomous community, and also each city, has its own specific entrepreneurial ecosystem. Entrepreneurs thus have different mechanisms to launch or strengthen their projects and access mentoring services, development of business models or collaborative work systems. Differences between Incubators and Accelerators What is an incubator? The concept of incubators is often confused with that of accelerators.The first are those that support entrepreneurs from the birth of the idea and help them establish it through advice, training and often offer them the infrastructure to work from there.

2. Incubators are a sure way to help start-ups grow, learning from experts, finding great mentoring activities and connecting them with a powerful network of contacts. They provide resources that reduce the cost of creating a new company and the initial capital that a team needs to start work or to achieve key milestones in the earliest stages. They have become the new business school. An incubator is a company that is in charge of looking for future start-ups that have the potential to go to market. For this they have experts and advisors who work, together with the CEOs of each of these start-ups, developing their projects until they take shape. The incubation process is divided into three phases: Pre-incubation Develop the business plan that the start-up will have; With this, we seek to clearly define the business model, audience targeting and the strategic action plan.

3. Incubation Over a year (typically) we see the evolution of the company thanks to the business plan, which we will be designed in the previous phase as well as dividing the different tasks according to the departments: production, marketing, logistics, etc. Post-incubation Now it’s time to monitor the evolution of the project in order to analyze its growth and expansion expectations in the medium and long term. What is an accelerator? Accelerators work with already trained and mature companies, which require capital injection and advice to accelerate their growth.

4. The concept of accelerators had its beginnings in 2005, in Cambridge, Massachusetts; with the accelerator Y Combinator, which proposed a business incubation model combined with initial financing. Dropbox and Airbnb were part of the projects in which this accelerator collaborated. According to the Global Accelerator Report, today there are about 400 accelerators worldwide, which have invested approximately $190 million in about 900 start-ups. The advantage that accelerators have is that they allow businesses to generate a wide network of contacts for the entrepreneur, including both other entrepreneurs and mentors. The latter is a key piece to accelerators since they are people who have personally lived the challenge of creating a start-up and therefore have a lot of experience in the field.

5. Unlike incubation, the Accelerator is dedicated to accelerating a project that is already under development. The main objective of this action is to obtain real benefits as soon as the company enters the market. An acceleration process uses agile techniques to facilitate the transition from solid ideas to real events. Mentoring work is essential for the project to move forward faster. R&D Grants Once a business has consolidated the company, they must look for the necessary financing that allows them to grow as a company. There are numerous types of investment in start-ups, one of the most popular and that offers a great opportunity are applications for R&D Grants. Research and development (R&D) grant offer multiple ways to finance projects related to R&D demands at regional, national or even at the European level. The main criterion is established by the nature of each project, that is, whether it is field research, start-up of innovative companies, improvement of technological equipment, or other R&D opportunities. Applying for an R&D Grantis a staged process and It is necessary to evaluate the nature of your project, its scope and its viability before deciding between the different options. There are also numerous grants from the UK and the European Union, which co-finance especially sustainable and transnational projects in innovation and research, education and training and the tech sectors to name a few. Take time to look at the application guidelines and the incubator or accelerator can often help improve your chances of success in application.