This article was taken from the December 2014 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Accelerators are now all the rage. Thanks to the success of Y Combinator, Seedcamp and Techstars, Silicon Valley's accelerator models are spreading like wildfire. There's BioCity in Scotland, the FinTech Innovation Lab in London, Accelerace in Denmark, and a clutch of others with names like Spark Lab, Collide, Oxygen and Catapult. The accelerator has become an essential accessory to prove a company's entrepreneurial credentials: everyone from Barclays to the Sundance Film Festival now has one. Accelerators speed the transformation of promising ideas into investable businesses. They provide a small number of carefully chosen teams with an intense but limited period of support from facilitators and mentors in a space that is highly collaborative and fiercely competitive.
Accelerating makes sense if you need to get from A to B as fast as possible, but it makes little sense when you are lost in a fog of possibilities and you have no clear sense of direction or destination. That's why I would like to create the world's first Decelerator, a place where you go to innovate by slowing down. The Decelerator would excel at providing two things vital to innovation that the accelerator takes for granted: perspective and purpose.
Often the kind of insight you need comes from patient, open-ended inquiry and careful ethnography, studying how consumers live. Christian Madsbjerg <span class="s1">and Mikkel B Rasmussen in The Moment of Clarity argue that great business ideas come when companies change their perspective on the world. Samsung doubled its share of the TV market after it dared to decelerate and work out a new perspective on what a TV could stand for. It decided to make TVs that were like pieces of Danish-designed furniture. The insight that transformed its TV business came from knowing when to slow down and adopt a different vantage.
Finding a sense of purpose is not something to be rushed either. Business writers, including Jim Collins in Built to Last and Simon Sinek in Start With Why, remind us that the best companies have deeply held values that not only guide them but also attract loyal disciples. Apple and Ben &
Jerry's do not just make good products, they attract consumers because their well-designed products embody their meritocratic, anti-establishment values. To paraphrase Sinek: people do not just buy what you do; they buy what you stand for.
To help entrepreneurs find that perspective and purpose, my Decelerator would offer an extendable period in which people could reflect on how the world is changing.
They could do this by reading, or maybe through observation in the field and through a mixture of silent reflection, walking and making things with their hands. The aim would be to allow your mind to become available to the world in new ways and for your thoughts to take an unscheduled and unplanned detour somewhere interesting.
Innovation is a bit like cooking. In his book The Table Comes First, Adam Gopnik argues that there are two kinds of cooking. Fast cooking -- searing -- involves ingredients cooked briefly at very high temperatures. Very slow cooking -- ragu -- takes a long time, at low temperatures to allow the flavours to mix in complex ways. Accelerators are good at searing -- but we also need places that are good at slow cooking.
That is why the world needs a Decelerator.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
