Why do we still send Startups to a Classroom?
Elementary school is not scalable. You need a teacher, a classroom, and everyone needs to be there at the same time to make it work.
Some even say that we have a broken education system. Yet we support startup founders as we teach our kids.
We replace the classroom with a co-working space, the teachers with mentors and lectures with workshops. Since everyone needs to be there at the same time, scalability becomes no longer an option.
On top, successful innovation is not predictable. No selection process, no venture capital partner beats a success rate of 10 - 20 % in the long run. Endless days are spent to carefully select a few teams. Out of hundreds of applications, a few are chosen and still, most of them will fail.
So what is the alternative, if we want to create more successful innovators that solve our problems?
We can replace the co-working space with an online community. We can replace non-scalable mentors with peer to peer learning. We can replace workshops with projects. All connected with chat and videos calls. All online and almost for free.
Remote Startup Programs might not be the same as the accelerators we know today, but they might give more founders a chance to make their dreams come true and solve some of our challenges.
MOOCs like Udacity change university education and online educators like Compass Charter replace our schools. They all use the technology we work with already every day.
Have you considered how your program would look like remotely? It might give you the bigger leverage in the long run than to ponder over which office space to pick for your next batch of startups.