Networking and visualisation software company Citrix has launched a new initiative at its Citrix Startup Accelerator in California called the Innovators Program, which will aim to accelerate the development of mobile, cloud and collaboration technologies.
The scheme will involve corporate product teams, both from within Citrix and external, that will work with entrepreneurs in the space to provide formal training, mentoring and access to technology tools along with seed funding.
The investor council features representatives from 13 venture capital firms while corporate advisors for the initiative include executives from Coca Cola, Silicon Valley Bank, Ricoh, Robert Bosch, AMD and PriceWaterhouseCoopers
“It’s a potent mixture of early stage investment or what I like to call innovation capital, a customized entrepreneurial curriculum and rapid research & development program wrapped into an intensive 12-week course,” Reuven Cohen, a strategic advisor and mentor for the programme, said in an article written for Forbes this week.
The aim is to develop promising ideas into fully fledged startup companies within a three-month period and in the process create a new model that will help enhance the environment for startups in the enterprise software sector.
“The old models for strategic corporate investment and R&D are no longer working,” Cohen explained.
“To address these challenges, Citrix and others in the industry are embarking on a journey, much like the programme itself, a journey intended to help us discover the challenges and opportunities for creating a new kind of intrapreneur (internal entrepreneur.) We are doing this by bringing together a global team of innovators to share, inspire and hopefully create the next generation of enterprise technology.”
One way these challenges will be met is through the concept of ‘lean startups’, Cohen proposed, which involve startups iteratively creating products or services focused on the requirements of their early customers.
This in turn would enable them to cut risk and avoid investing substantial amounts of funding in large-scale projects or expensive product launches. The Innovators Program will seek to take such ideas into account when attempting to innovate in new ways that avoid unnecessary failure.