How Boomtown Innovation Immerses Tech Teams in an Adaptive Environment.

Innovators and entrepreneurs are weary of conventional accelerator programs, which have little to offer beyond repeating timeworn, hackneyed, cookie-cutter programs.

Many such programs are templated and predictable, stretch across 12 weeks, and end in a Demo Day when founders are paraded in front of investors and kicked out of the nest as trite and hollow wishes for continued “business success” echo in their ears.

An adaptive innovation environment is something else entirely. It is an experience that meets growing companies and partners where they are, based on their specific needs and mandates. It identifies and recruits startup and scaleup teams which are uniquely ready to work inside a churning/living ecosystem of business needs. It makes matches and forges collaborative relationships based on fit, which is focused on continuously improving, experimenting and thriving in the adaptive environment, as opposed to just making intros and hoping some business comes of it.

The environment does not presuppose learning and engagement, but rather absorbs, listens, and responds accordingly. Most significantly, adaptive innovation is rooted in the most complex of human problems: The notion of not knowing something you don’t know, and must therefore discover.

Innovators are rare among human beings; they possess characteristics shared by very few people. They have an intrinsic drive to discover what is next, to notice what is unnoticed, and to imagine the unimagined.

These traits are in very limited supply, and are often beaten out of individuals by the demands of the corporate complex, which rewards consistency, certainty, order, and obeisance to the status quo.

Human beings display a prevailing need to be right … It is one of the most basic functions of human bias. That instinct closes people’s minds to discovering something new and gaining insights about how to make a real impact.

Adaptive innovation, by contrast, requires people to not only accept being wrong at times, it requires them to embrace it. They must accept they do not know everything. By doing so, we allow each stage of discovery to provide us with learning, observations, and insight.

Michelangelo is said to have removed from the block of marble the things that were not The David. If we embrace the discovery of what is wrong, we have the opportunity to adaptively innovate what is right.

Boomtown Innovation immerses numerous emerging technologies companies into an adaptive innovation environment, and through the adaptation process – removing the things the technologies were not – helped them create success. They were able to let go of what they believed was of value to potential customers, and instead discover what was truly innovative.