Innovation Acceleration Group Blog

“If you are an accelerator without an incubation space, how does it work?” I was asked by several German executives in a sales meeting.

Dr. Mauro Rebelo has been a scientist his entire life. From a very young age, he had a vision of changing the world by solving not simply diagnosing, real problems. However, after a decade of working in academia he was less than satisfied. That is when he decided to become an entrepreneur. Little did he know entrepreneurship was much more difficult than laboratory research.

For the past 4 years, Sam Shames has transformed his position from CTO to the Chief Enthusiasm Officer at Embr Labs. In the fall of 2014, the IAG team worked with Sam and his co-founders from MIT during the Intel Make It Wearable Challenge. This challenge was based on IAG's Enterprise Startup Engagement program. The goal was to create a global challenge for startups to create wearable technology by implementing the, then newly released, Intel Edison chip. IAG worked with the startups to teach them how to validate and pitch their businesses, while Intel worked with the engineers to develop a working prototype.

Robert Bosch GmbH (Bosch) has established itself as a global leader in innovation and continuous improvement.  For more than 12 years, Bosch executives have partnered with  startups , universities and other outside partners to evolve and drive the company's innovation culture.  More recently, Bosch demonstrated its increasing commitment to continuous reinvention with the creation of a corporate-level division, fully dedicated to Business Model Innovation.  The company's considerable success with these efforts is evident in its ongoing delivery of innovative, market-changing new products, services, and business models, and in the increasing engagement of Bosch employees, who are embracing innovation and structured risk-taking across all divisions in increasing numbers.  This cross-divisional, multi-level commitment to structured innovation processes is accelerating market-validated, team-driven innovations.

What if “innovation” was a repeatable business process your employees could do every day?

What if you didn’t have to hire Steve Jobs and create crazy Silicon Valley-style incentive plans and “innovation outposts” to reliably create new products and services that keep pace with the technology and business model disruptions startups take advantage of?

In April 2015, IAG partnered with Intel India and India's Department of Science and Technology (DST) with support from MyGov and the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY). This public-private group built a nationwide acclerator for Indian Makers called the Innovate for Digital India Challenge. The goal was to build social ventures - specifically products and services focused on e-government, e-health, e-finance and agriculture that drive upward social mobility. 1,913 ideas where submitted from across India and 20 teams were selected for the accelerator program.

We are educators.

Aleda and Jonathan Schaffer are a power team. They built a startup by combining their maker minds and love for excerise. We met them about 1 year ago when we taught the America's Greatest Maker's cast how to develop a business model while they competed for the $1million prize and title of America's Greatest Maker. Making it to the Finalist round, the Schaffer's were (sadly) eliminated. However, their momentum kept rolling! They used their new entreprenuership skills to jump start their business, Pure Carbon. Within the past year, they've smoothed out their creation, the Delta™ Gloves (designed to provide smart coaching for gymer goers) and are now ready to launch! 

 Below is a short testimony video of our Scaling Startup Ecosystem program in Florianoplois, Brazil.  In 7-weeks, we guided 25 teams to validated thier business models by talking to over 100+ customers. Participants of this program were students and faculty of UDESC, local startups and corporations.