This blueprint is based on our past experience setting up, running and advising at several incubation and acceleration programs across Europe in the past decade, including our own, Firmhouse Venture Lab. Terms like incubation and acceleration get mixed up. We think our setup works for both incubation programs as well as acceleration programs.

Experience and heuristics which we base this blueprint on:

• The educational part of a program is fundamental to the future success of its participants. This is also the main expectation of any aspiring entrepreneur who enters the program.
• Yet, opposite to that the participants also expect to apply whatever they learn during the program to start building their own business. Whenever participants would complain about the educational part of the program it would always be about too many activities and too many mandatory events.
• Any new business is a search mission and should allow participants to go out and discover things. It doesn’t matter if they hit it off from the start or find their potential product/market-fit at the last day of the program.
• Yet, opposite to that it’s commonly known that the odds for success for any startup founder are highly skewed and in each cohort there will be founders who ‘get it’ straight out of the gate. Good program managers make sure to focus on the potential portfolio winners early on. Very often, program managers focus on getting the entire cohort to meet a certain standard and they miss the opportunity to nurture their best investments in spite of lost causes.

We know from first-hand experience as from some of the people we worked with internationally that light-weight and demand-driven programs which focus on a certain cadence and peer-learning provide the best outcomes in the long run. Rigid and prescriptive programs yield mediocre outcomes as the program operates without responding to flux and context.