Member-only story
The Essential Limits of Accelerators
What accelerators are good for, and what generators can do better
TL;DR: An analysis of the shortcomings of our current innovation ecosystem in accelerating essential ventures for the public purpose, and a proposal for a new structured innovation support model to generate solutions to challenges facing society. This essay breaks down the assumptions underlying startup accelerators, and provides a high-level step-by-step approach to a program model called the generator to focus our communities’ creativity on developing and rapidly validating new approaches to the challenges we face.
I love accelerators. In 2005, I founded an organization called PresenTense with the mission to exponentially multiply social innovation in my community. The natural outgrowth of that effort was the launch of an accelerator program in Jerusalem, Israel, in 2007. I worked for Aharon Horwitz’s startup at the time, and we thought to ourselves: wouldn’t it be great to bring together social entrepreneurs and techies to build technologies with social goals at heart?
Back then there were two accelerator programs we knew of — YCombinator, and Techstars. They ran essentially the same model: they invested ramen noodle money in aspiring entrepreneurial teams (between $8,000-$18,000) over 3 months, provided a place to meet…
