How we’re shifting gears to support the next generation of purpose-led businesses
Hi! It’s us again, INCUBATE — The University of Sydney’s Flagship Startup Program. We run a range of startup courses, Pre-Accelerator and Accelerator Programs to empower the University of Sydney community of founders to create and grow innovative businesses.
In June, we relaunched our second round of Pre-Accelerator Programs for 2023. After successfully delivering our Digital Arts Program in collaboration with Australia Council for the Arts and our first-ever Student Pre-Accelerator Program in Q1, our team put our heads together to strategise on the next program streams to support our vision of being a world-leading startup community accelerating founders who innovate for a better future.
We considered offering a niche focus on climate tech or female founders, but upon discussion — realised that we’re one of few Accelerators that offer industry-agnostic programs. So that’s where we set our focus for these cohorts.
And why is that, we thought? Is it more beneficial to group together communities of founders in the same industry? With the same identified business problems? Of the same gender? Perhaps, in some contexts — but for us we find that growth happens outside one’s comfort zone, and integrating founders from different walks of life — ages, genders, ethnicities, industries and experience levels — serves our cohort’s best in terms of their growth.
Therefore instead, we chose to split our two cohorts based on business stage. As a Pre-Accelerator, we accepted startup founders ranging from those with an inkling of a business idea they were eagerly willing to test and iterate, to those with an active MVP or in-market. Thus, two cohorts were born: Ideation and developmental.
From 49 applications, we accepted 23 startups, split across two cohorts. We’ve welcomed founders in industries including space tech, skincare, biotech, ed-tech and more. You name it — we’ve probably got them! Industry-agnostic is our bread and butter and we’re so grateful to have a wide array of mentors in our community who act as subject-matter experts for our founders.
As per our guiding principles, we encourage opportunity through diversity — as such, we’re proud to welcome founders from seven different faculties at The University of Sydney, including Engineering, Arts + Social Sciences and Architecture. Our cohort of University of Sydney-affiliated founders comprises 43% students, 13% staff members, 39% alumni and 8% researchers. We’re also excited to welcome 65% of the cohort as first-generation Australians, welcoming 4 as graduates from our Proto: Startup Fundamentals Course and 1 student from an Industry and Community Project (ICPU).
Further to this, we still maintain support for the notion of failing fast — encouraging our founders to test, validate and ideate on their early-stage business ideas. This aligns with our guiding principle of embodying a founder-first approach, where we believe and invest in founders first, as opposed to being solely connected to their business idea. Why? Because it’s likely that the founder will cycle through a handful of early-stage startup ideas before they land on something worth scaling. It makes sense to us to support the founder throughout the entirety of this journey.
We’ve also seen a shift in our community of founders focusing on tackling real-world problems. The focus on purpose-driven businesses is no longer just a ‘trend’, with this cohort of startups focused on sustainable skincare, UV protection, pain management for musculoskeletal injuries, women’s health monitoring and nicotine addiction solutions.
If you’re interested in learning more, you can visit our website, register your expression of interest to mentor our community or if you’d like to jump onboard and join our INCUBATE Community in our next Pre-Accelerator Program — register your interest here.
