imec.istart – imec’s Corporate Accelerator
imec, the world leading R&D hub for nano-electronics and digital technology, established the imec.istart accelerator program in the Summer of 2011. Today, it supports more than 185 tech startups.
Since 2015, the program was benchmarked as a Top Research institution Business Accelerator by UBI Global, even becoming the no. 1 in Europe since 2018.
The purpose of imec.istart is to create, optimize, stimulate and expand an ecosystem of tech companies. imec uses the program to support the economy in general by creating synergies amongst tech companies and between such companies and imec. It also allows imec to expand its research and development efforts on learnings gained through the acceleration program, and to provide easier access to its inventions and technology to the participating companies.
imec has also established a pre-seed venture capital fund. The fund is the largest of its kind in Belgium for pre-seed investments, amounting to a total of 12,5 million euro. Investors include imec, the Flemish Region, ING Belgium, BNP Paribas Fortis, the Cronos Group and Telenet.
The fund offers tech entrepreneurs an initial investment of 50,000 euro to help them start their business. High-promising startups will also have a chance to receive further financial support from the fund, ranging from 20,000 to 100,000 euro and deeper support to help them further develop their business with e.g. Living Labs trajectories, rapid prototyping and specific internationalization programs. Imec.istart has also established eight industry verticals with different corporate partners, who provide additional industry-specific services and mentoring, as well as creating the option for co-investments by such corporates alongside the fund.
imec.istart launches 3 sector agnostics calls per year and accepts around 25 companies per year of which a growing percentage applies from outside of Belgium. The investment committee of the fund, which is composed of representatives of the limited partners, as well as an independent member, screens and selects the participating companies.
The acceleration program has a 12 to 18-month duration. imec.istart’s venture acceleration managers come from a variety of backgrounds and assist in screening the participating companies and providing insights, in-depth coaching and feedback at no cost. In the event substantive technology collaboration is required with imec, specific commercial arrangements are negotiated.
The program is highly acclaimed by the participating entrepreneurs, who appreciate the one-on-one coaching by the managers and the offer of internal and external workshops covering all relevant aspects for successfully creating and scaling tech companies. Additionally, the various initiatives to support the internationalization of the ventures or to strengthen their teams with additional talents are highly valued, also by the program’s alumni.
Sven De Cleyn, imec.istart program manager, shared the following insights regarding the establishment of corporate incubation labs:
• Program design: if well designed, startups can greatly benefit from the participation to incubation or acceleration programs. It is of critical importance that a corporate innovation lab treats startups on an at arm’s length basis, allowing the corporate to become acquainted with a broad variety of new business ideas without putting unreasonable requirements on the participating startups.
• Content is king: only providing a co-working space is not sufficient. To establish a successful program the corporate needs to also provide, resources, expertise, mentoring, access to a network (both internally as well as externally) and potentially equity to further develop promising ideas or speed product development and time to market. Such effort should be maintained over the course of several years to build the reputation of the program.
• Startup governance: very often young startups are not properly organized from a legal and financial perspective. The corporate can use the equity investment to ensure that the startup remedies insufficiencies in its organization (such as e.g. ensuring valid IP transfers to the startups by all developers) which will benefit the startup greatly in the long run.
• IP ownership: it is crucial for startups to remain owner of their core intellectual property. Corporate incubation labs which provide co-ownership arrangements for all activities of such startup within the lab are likely to run into trouble through endless discussions with entrepreneurs on such co-ownership arrangements. The mere fact of having the startups participate in the program should be sufficient for the corporate as it will give it a first seat at the table to discuss potential commercial collaborations.
• Commercial collaborations: in order to maximize the potential benefits of engaging in incubation or acceleration labs, the corporates should be ready and willing to really engage with the startups and scaleups in the program. Only when being an integral part of the corporate’s innovation strategy, including allocating internal budgets to for example set up proof-of-concepts or other joint projects, can the accelerator yield significant tangible outcomes for the corporate(s).