Building an Accelerator in Lean Startup mode

« Show your work », that’s the title of Austin Kleon’s book , I do not do it enough. I know I do not do it well. I even had an experience a few years ago, when I was invited by French President for a dinner at L’Elysees. A guy wrote on some social network : « why him? ». It is only years later, and quite recently, that I realized that he, and others, had no information about what I achieved and worst, what I was working on at that time.

So let me  share a bit of what I am working on these days. It is not finished, it is not complete and "delivered" but it is a work in progress which calls comments and recommendations from you. Not praises. It’s better to show the work in progress, engage conversations, than deliver a finished product that nobody saw coming. This, I learned it.

2021 will see my 3rd co-developed product with EPFL Innovation Park. And if you read me here, you have a prime news in what follows.

In 2018, when I came back from Japan, with my friends Lan, Massimo and Raphael, we started crafting a C-level program called FastTrack Corporate-Startup. The program is a 4-day workshop that we repeat many times during the year. Its objective is to share best practices in fruitful collaboration between corporate executives and startup founders. The program is quite unique and was demanded by St Gallen MBA University too. In 2020, the program was renamed « Tech4Growth » in order to start a series with « Tech4Trust » which was following.

Launched in 2019, Tech4Trust is an acceleration program for cybersecurity startups in Switzerland. My involvement was on the design of the program with Lan, hosting of the Valais event at Groupe Mutuel. Tech4Trust was took over by Canton de Vaud since then and became « Trust Valley ».

In 2020 we started designing a new program and we will announce it in a few days : Tech4Eva.

Tech4Eva is an acceleration program and a hub for the "FemTech" innovation. FemTech, the short for Female Technologies, is an emerging sub-segment of HealthTech focusing on Women’s health technologies.

FemTech is not a pick by chance or by opportunity. It is one of the most beautiful theme I can work on. It is close to an ideology choice for me. Women are the pillars of the society, and I admire them. Developing health solutions for them is a kind of "sacred mission". We decided not to communicate on this precise hashtag but for me it qualifies to #SocialImpact.

Tech4Eva will be the first FemTech in Switzerland (and maybe the first one in continental Europe too).

A quick intro about the project in this movie:

What is interesting to share is the process we followed as we heavily followed the LeanStartup Management philosophy and field approach.

Back in April 2020, we started discussing the topic with Anna, drafted a few ideas on the whiteboard and made a minimum research on who was doing what in the domain of FemTech.

In September, I proposed to Lan to have EPFL Innovation Park as our partner and create a joint program in the continuation of our two other programs.

In November, I pitched to Groupe Mutuel for a first 3-month sprint for a limited budget to validate:

• the Desirability of the project: mostly the interest from startups and our internal teams. We received an enthusiastic answer from external and internal.
• the Feasibility: who do we need? What it will look like (branding, web site, flyers, programme,...) ?
• the Viability: how much we can expect from the program as benefits (not as hard cash), but mostly in image, internal and external.

3 months later we had:

• a program branding and web site : https://tech4eva.ch
• a list of volunteer startups for the first season who expressed their expectations, which helped us to craft the right program,
• a program in line with the budget,
• a list of enthusiastic partners around the world (accelerators in Japan, USA, Europe,...),
• a set of marketing tools to sustain the community growth,
• an announced date : March 8th, the Day of Women’s Rights which served as a deadline for the entire team,
• a launch date : April 2021,
• a motivated team who can « touch » the reality of the program and only wants to push it further and bigger...

There was no marketing study, no exponential curves and trends on my "gate" presentation at the end of the sprint, only validated evidences and an MVP that prove it will work and helped us to be laser sharp relevant in what we do.

80% of innovation projects fail. It is a known fact. An innovation team’s mission is to de-risk innovative projects. Presenting market analysis would not have de-risk anything. Presenting a study wouldn't have motivated anyone to rally us on the project. We would have heard: "These are only figures on slides", when I heard "It is difficult to go back now...".

If you are presented market intelligence data on slide just ask the presenter : "How do you know?". Because there is only one way to know, it is to go on the market, with iterations, asking people, showing them stuff and collecting real life evidences.

I wanted to share this "hacking" experience and I am happy to discuss it with you. This is not rocket science but I thought about sharing a real-life application of Lean Startup Management.

My recommendations:

• If you go this way, go full like there is no other way to do it,
• Do not waste time explaining theories and methodologies to your customer, partners and team (keep this for a blog later ;-)
• Cut the process in small chunks with clear deliverables (yet each being unperfect) of all components of the product,
• Listen, listen, listen. Listen everyone, everything, big warnings like low signals. The only objective is to build a fact-proven intuition, or pivot.

The announcement is March 8th, until then please comment on what you would have done differently, share your recommendations and experience.

Now, I can't resist to flatter your ears with the Schwizerdütsch (Swiss German) version :