What's the problem that makes it difficult for good ideas to come to fruition?

Although Silicon Valley advocates "act fast and break things," this approach is not sustainable. Hackathons and open innovation challenges can generate promising ideas, but they often fail to have a larger impact because most new ventures lack adequate support in terms of networking resources. While some intermediaries, startup hubs, and accelerators offer more structured, network-based support in the early stages of new venture ideation and team formation, they provide limited support in the medium to long term. This gap presents a significant opportunity for intermediaries that can offer such support and represents a path to reducing the persistently high failure rates of new ventures.

Despite the numerous initiatives to promote cross-departmental collaboration and open innovation, developing a game-changing idea and successfully bringing it to market remains extremely challenging for businesses. Many believe that the problem lies in the scarcity of new ideas and the need for greater effort to involve diverse voices in the conversation. However, people often overlook an important fact: successful innovation is not just about generating countless ideas.

Research on hackathons and other forms of accelerated innovation indicates that very few ideas actually materialize beyond the initial brainstorming stage. The organizers of these events often focus solely on the collision of ideas and talent without long-term planning. People should approach these activities with a mindset of making long-term commitments, but most are unprepared or underestimate the future prospects.

In fact, innovation is not just about generating an idea, but rather a lengthy collaborative journey. Daniel Epstein, CEO of the Unreasonable Group, which brings together a global network of entrepreneurs to address the world's most pressing challenges alongside investors, creatives, and business leaders, stated, "20th-century business was often defined by competitive advantage. 21st-century enterprises will be defined by collaborative advantage." A wealth of academic research on social networks, psychology, creativity, and the entrepreneurial process confirms this viewpoint. Studies show that when an intermediary is responsible for developing innovation and maintaining cooperation and planning among relevant parties, innovation is more likely to succeed.

In this article, we draw on this research and our own study to describe the key role that intermediaries can play in the innovation process. We demonstrate how intermediaries provide support for collaboration throughout the innovation process—they offer innovators opportunities to build networks, help innovators develop these opportunities into relationships, and then maintain and renew these networks as collaboration progresses.

Step One: Building Connections

In addition to simply bringing people together and providing a framework for their conversations, intermediaries must also foster relationships of mutual trust. Unreasonable Impact (UI) is a prime example, a collaboration between Barclays Bank and the Unreasonable Group, with whom we have worked in various capacities such as mentors, academic advisors, and clients. UI provides entrepreneurs with networks and resources needed for business development and helps them address challenges that arise during rapid scaling.

UI conducts three projects each year, bringing together a select group of growth-stage enterprises. These projects typically last five to seven days and include courses addressing key needs of entrepreneurs, ranging from understanding regulatory changes to scaling production. Entrepreneurs also have the opportunity to interact, receive feedback, and share concerns. To date, participants have established over 300 companies in 53 countries, generating over $7 billion in revenue and employing over 25,000 full-time employees.

To better understand this process and as part of an Accenture study on how cross-departmental collaboration addresses complex social issues, we conducted a series of interviews and workshops with 28 collaborators. We found that UI's success in building collaboration can be attributed to two main factors:

Careful selection. Most open innovation research focuses on how to find a framework to foster challenges and increase participation. However, UI takes a different approach: it personally selects and invites projects and individuals to join the community. In addition to considering financial status, the social impact of the enterprise, and broader community diversity, the UI team ensures that the invited entrepreneurs align with the mission, values, and beliefs of the UI community.

The selection process is very rigorous, and success is not the only criterion. The UI team seeks individuals they believe can contribute to the community, which means they must be good collaborators. One UI researcher we spoke with said, "I just believe that everyone in the UI community has the passion and heart to serve the community."

The UI team strives to create "psychological safety" within the community, a concept proposed by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, which means creating an environment where entrepreneurs can comfortably share successes and challenges. UI believes that equal rights between mentors and mentees are key to achieving this state, so they avoid using terms like "mentors"—they refer to the guidance relationship as collaboration and the participants as researchers.

Curated experiences. From workshops to team-building activities to community dinners, UI carefully orchestrates on-site experiences for the projects. All the researchers and mentors we spoke with mentioned the "magical moments" they encountered during these activities. UI often combines group interactions with debriefing sessions.

The format of the community dinners is also unique. Researchers are divided into five to six tables, each with a mentor. Each table has a theme, such as "Tell us about a decision you made that changed your life" or "Describe an item that is meaningful to you." Each researcher has five minutes to respond without interruption. Participants often share personal emotional experiences. As one participant recalled, "There wasn't a dinner without tears."

The courses also include some downtime, such as yoga or quiet walks. Research in organizational psychology has fully demonstrated the importance of creating reflective space: people come to understand those with shared experiences and discover people with whom they can build relationships through reflection.

Carefully planned debriefing sessions lay the foundation for strong relationships among participants. For example, two researchers, one studying recyclable 3D printing and the other studying residential wind turbines, discovered during a lunch at a UI project that they had common connections and interests. In the months following the project, they stayed in touch, exchanging the latest information and advice, and formed a deep friendship in their entrepreneurial journeys. A year after their first meeting, they met again at another UI event. As they presented their product prototypes, they suddenly realized the opportunity to collaborate more closely, improve their products, and potentially develop a new device. When we interviewed one of the researchers, they were in the process of applying for funding together to organize their ideas into a more organized collaboration.

The UI community has laid the foundation for building a relationship of mutual trust, enabling researchers to work in a flexible manner and minimizing bureaucracy and management constraints. However, as the scale of collaboration expands, their organizational needs also become more complex. To address these issues, it is necessary to re-emphasize the establishment of relationships. Although the researchers in the first example are aware of this issue, they neither have the time nor the resources to successfully address it.

Similarly, this also provides an opportunity for intermediary organizations, giving them a reason to guide collaborators through this stage. Intermediary organizations can assist collaborators in two ways:

Providing reflective checkpoints. Intermediary organizations can create opportunities for collaborators to gather together, hold workshops, semi-structured conference calls, or face-to-face reflection sessions, helping venture teams negotiate role transitions and relationship changes (or even trigger new relationships), realign goals, and introduce new management structures.

These checkpoints provide an opportunity for reflection, allowing social entrepreneurs to step back and thoughtfully consider what they have learned in order to put these lessons into practice.

Cultivating an ecosystem. In addition to promoting collaboration, UI also aims to create a community of social entrepreneurs, connecting with more personnel, investors, and innovators. A thriving ecosystem will enable innovators to expand their business scale. Past participants in the UI project keep in touch with each other and also establish connections with new students. Sometimes, they themselves become mentors. Potential investors also connect with researchers, sometimes providing funding for their businesses or helping them obtain funding.

This is what happened with 80 Acres Farms, a vertical farm located in Ohio that uses 100% renewable energy. The co-founders of 80 Acres Farms met the Barclays Bank team for the first time in 2019 through their participation in the UI project. When 80 Acres Farms needed to raise funds to build its first commercial-scale production facility, it received investment in Series A and Series B rounds from Barclays Sustainable Impact Capital, with the bank's team serving as the sole placement agent for the $200 million capital round in Series B.

Although Silicon Valley advocates "moving fast and breaking things," this approach is not sustainable. Hackathons and open innovation challenges can generate promising ideas, but they often fail to have a greater impact because most new businesses receive too little support in the interpersonal dynamics of collaboration. While some intermediary organizations, entrepreneurship centers, and accelerators provide more structured, network-based support in the early stages of new business conception and team building, they offer little support in the medium to long term. This gap presents a huge opportunity for intermediary organizations that can provide this support and is a way to reduce the high failure rate of new businesses.

Keywords: innovation

Anne-Laure Fayard, Jess Majekodunmi, Martina Mendola, Rachel Kenny | Text

Anne-Laure Fayard is the Social Innovation ERA Chair Professor at the Nova School of Business and Economics and a visiting researcher at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. Jess Majekodunmi is the Managing Director of The Dock, Accenture's global R&D and innovation flagship center. Martina Mendola and Rachel Kenny are researchers at The Dock.

Feishu, ChatGPT | Translated by Yuxiao Zhang | Edited by Proofreading

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