John Whatmore's blog

InnovationRCA, the Royal College of Art's incubator: a remarkable pedagogical odyssey

John Whatmore - 28.09.2012

With the intensive and sophisticated learning regime that it has developed, the RCA feels that it has a lot to give other incubators. But will it deliver on this? Nesta who is a major supporter of the initiative has high hopes that it can.

InnovationRCA, the RCA's four-year old incubator, has developed a carefully curated learning regime for those of its graduate students who seek to take the entrepreneurial route of trying to develop a new design led business. This incubator regime is in the nature of action-learning, and appears to be both at a very high level and outstandingly comprehensive.

There is a two-and-a-half week training programme prior to selection and the RCA runs a number of networking events to help candidates to understand their own business roles and skills and to match up with appropriate team members; and the RCA handles contractual details and Articles of Association etc in order to relieve incubatees of this administration.

The RCA's contributions consist of services and cash - including loans, though these are not as flexible as incubatees might like. Access to design, prototyping and testing facilities is the essence of the RCA's contribution to its incubatees.

There are some visiting contacts, including RCA alumni, and one-to-ones [tutorials] with the 'senior coach' are part of the regime, as are panel days in which 'everyone is sitting round the table'.

Exploring values is of the essence in the programme; routes to scaling is a topic; 'benefits' and 'confidence limits' are explored mathematically; Options Theory is considered; and time ratios help to sensitise students to prioritising. A large number of parameters about each project are logged on spreadsheets.

Annual investment evenings are held with a panel of investors (some of whom come back from one year to the next), for which short, sharp training is provided in pitching. Some incubatees are invited to return a year later when they may have a more solid proposal and better understanding of business.

The learning regime that Innovation RCA has developed seems to have been aimed at providing its participants a taste-in-use of a wide variety of techniques for directing, controlling, assessing and making decisions about the progress of new businesses, to such a point that its recipients are would-be directors of new incubators. 

Over these four years, it has nurtured sixteen new businesses ('all of the students very bright ... and would succeed anywhere')  and begun to see some return flow from its investments. 

Like many developing incubators it is still reliant on sponsorship support, in this case from Lord Dyson, the RCA and Nesta, but its business plan shows increasing self sufficiency as its investments grow. InnovationRCA recognises that what it has developed ought to be made available more widely - to those who run incubators - to enable them to benefit from its experience, this spreading of insight and learning was instrumental in gaining Nesta's support and InnovationRCA keenly wants to deliver on this aspect.