How Startup Accelerators Can Act As A Catalyst For Growth & Innovation

Startup founders looking for maturity and scalability in their journey always explore avenues to gather useful insights. However, in a highly saturated and competitive market landscape, getting quick help becomes challenging. That’s when a startup founder turns to an accelerator that helps them in designing frameworks for success.   

India has emerged as the third-largest startup ecosystem in the world. It has recognised exponential growth from 2015 to 2022 recording a 15X increase in the total funding of startups, a 9X increase in the number of investors and a 7X increase in the number of incubators. 

The Indian startup and unicorn status is flourishing, however, after a harsh funding winter, it becomes imperative to explore the need to innovate to drive the economic progress of a startup as well as the economy. Considering the scenario, accelerators and incubators act as a catalyst for driving startup innovation and growth. 

India has the third largest number of active accelerator programmes in the world. This clearly demonstrates the role of accelerators as a powerful vehicle in helping founders learn, adapt, create networks, raise funds and build a startup. Not to forget, these accelerators are in charge of shaping business innovation, ideas and offerings for new-age startups. 

Understanding the exigency to innovate faster and more consistently, startups see accelerators as mentors to drive innovation. 

Foundation Of Innovation

A startup’s journey involves idea formation, validation, growth and maturity. It is quite common to believe that all these stages are fulfilled by funding. However, for a rewarding and impactful journey, startups need to excel at a number of stages. 

Many startups fail not only because of a scarcity of funds but also because there is no perfect product-market fit, lack of revenue, poor marketing strategy, and premature scaling, among others. Finding a business opportunity is tough and here, accelerators come into play to decode the relevance of innovation, under highly uncertain conditions. 

Most startup ideas are not viable at the beginning and founders lose a hefty amount of resources to put everything in place from the very initial phase. Given the scenario, accelerators have emerged to support entrepreneurs with a prime objective of boosting innovation and business acceleration. Creative ideas possess no value until they make innovation happen. Accelerators make these innovative ideas commercially viable in order to ensure startup success. 

One of the prime reasons an accelerator-backed startup always wins is the process and a structured framework to foster innovation. These programmes enable new-age startups to adopt a specific set of methodologies that help them manage contingencies and successfully develop their innovation capabilities.

Facilitating Innovation Capabilities

Innovation is essential to our evolving economy. With expedited digital transformation comes the necessity to bring technological innovations. It should be attributed to new-age innovation leaders who bring up-to-date recommendations to the market and build businesses around it. To reach that level of innovation, a startup requires openness and a culture of collaboration to make things happen. This expands their willingness to take risks and exchange progressive ideas. 

The supportive peer-to-peer working environment embedded during the startup acceleration programme leverages the innovation capabilities of startups. This promotes networking while mentoring and making other resources available for accelerating the growth of new-age startups. The accelerators deliberately conduct their programmes in cohorts because it works for every founder with much efficiency who probably end up helping each other and learning to validate their innovative ideas. 

Instead of the isolation that a founder could face due to the absence of a fully-operational office space, accelerators work on providing them with a workspace equipped with modern amenities. This strengthens the communication mechanisms for them while accessing business networks which reflect innovation capabilities. In addition, it instils innovative thinking habits in the founder, making room to progress and sustain. 

Final Thoughts

Participating in an accelerator programme can help new-age startups get access to market opportunities early on. The mentorship-driven programme boosts their confidence with a sense of support, intensive guidance and a strong structure to implement the idea. 

As a result, founders get quick help to grow their businesses and they often get better chances to attract top VCs to raise funds. This adds another framework to help them climb the ladder of success while scaling the business in time.