How David became Goliath's teacher

Abstract

This report set out to provide an answer on the question of whether the standard format of a startup accelerator program would transfer well to an internal corporate accelerator program, and, when this was proven to not be the case, it was shown how this format could be adapted for internal corporate purposes by answering the three empirical research questions of the study. The first question was concerned with whether the components of this standard startup accelerator format would reduce the difficulty in reaching the goals of an internal corporate accelerator program, and it was shown that only half of the components in fact did so. The second question was what the actual levels of difficulty in reaching the goals of such a program were, and it was found that there was a strong distribution in the experienced levels of difficulty with reaching the goals by the population that was analyzed in the current study. The third and final question concerned whether this observed distribution in the levels of experienced difficulty could be explained by the characteristics that characterize internal corporate New Product Development projects, and it was found that this was indeed possible for some of the goals.
The results of these analyses were combined to formulate a set of design principles, which could be used to determine which components to include in a personalized internal corporate accelerator program, depending on the characteristics of a specific project in the program. Furthermore, it was shown how the design principles could be used to determine the proper division of time and resources over these components in the program. Finally, it was argued that the principles could be used for selection purposes, to select only those projects to partake in an internal corporate accelerator program that would stand to gain the most benefit from such a program. After formulating the design principles for such programs, it was argued that these internal corporate accelerator programs could be used as a vehicle for introducing improvements to the regular New Product Development processes of corporate organizations.