Innovators’ Incubation And Acceleration (IIA) Program Details
Any experimenting high school, vocational or technical school or university student or fresh graduate that intends to advance innovative solutions in agribusiness is eligible for our IIA program.
Anyone that is enrolled in other incubation programs is not allowed to join the program.
- Coworking space
- High speed internet
- Working exposure on the farm
- Seed fund for startups
The maximum duration of the program shall be no more than 6 months.
Any given cohort of our IIA program shall not be more than a group of 10 individual innovators.
Contents of the IIA program
Each incubation, acceleration or scaling program is built out of different modules that address the most important needs of the specific group of innovators or companies. Here is a complete overview of the kind of support that will be provided at each stage.
Incubation Modules
Ideation
- Ideation workshop & idea generation exercises
- Developing a Lean Canvas
- Building a Minimum Viable Product
- Customer validation / Customer Safari
Product/service design workshop
- Peer to peer feedback & support
- Mentorship & coaching
- Access to topical experts
Developing a sustainable and scalable business model
- Further development of Lean Canvas
- Defining & testing assumptions
- Business model scalability
Going to market
- Marketing
- Sales
- Distribution
Measuring Impact
- Theory of Change development
- Defining key metrics and how to integrate them into the service/product
Seed investment pitch
- Pitch development
- Presenting to angel investors
- Peer to peer feedback & support
- Mentorship & coaching
- Access to topical experts
Scaling Modules
As each venture takes a different approach and faces different challenges when scaling, we take a holistic, non-prescriptive approach and provide support that is largely tailored to each venture’s needs. The scaling process generally includes six steps.
Prove
- Work out if scaling is right for your company
- Assess readiness of your business to scale
- Improve your application readiness
Design
- Understand the options for scaling
- Select the scaling model that works for your business
- Design your scaling model
Systemize
- Develop recruitment and support functions for replication
- Document systems and processes
- Develop legal documentation
Pilot
- Understand vital elements needed to be in place for your scaling pilot to be a success
- Develop a plan for communicating with the implementing team
- Put a monitoring and evaluation framework into practice and install a feedback loop for continuous improvement
Explore new markets
- Select potential markets for scaling
- Understand your value proposition in the context of various markets
- Identify key actors and partners you need to scale into new markets
Scale
- Develop a clearer picture of organizational changes needed to achieve scale
- Go to key markets and channels
- Build strategic partnerships that help you scale
- Organizational model development
- Senior and middle management capacity
- Recruitment and talent management processes
- Legal forms and processes
- Brand and marketing
- Business development and sales
- Advanced financial modelling and management
Market exploration and penetration
We support scaling ventures in market exploration and penetration via trade missions, connections to key advisors and partners in the target markets and by providing access to various forms of financing and/or distribution channels of large corporates.
We believe that the launching of this program will help to improve the commercialization and modernization of agriculture, and the development of an indigenous agribusiness sector while imparting youth with relevant experience and skills. Applications to the next cohort of the IIA program will be announced on our website once they are open.