What are the many ways to support innovation?

While building a new venture builder to address the challenges faced by the medical rehabilitation system I searched for a taxonomy -- a comprehensive guidebook -- for different innovation support mechanisms and how they work. Specifically, in plain English, for how organizations can support the creation of new tools or services to solve problems they face.

Not having found one (please, if you have one let me know!!) I decided to write such a taxonomy, specifically for models that result in the formation of new entities (startups, either for-profit or for-purpose).

I'm midway through, and would be very interested to hear whether I'm missing models you know of, whether I've defined the models I listed incorrectly, and any other thoughts you have on the matter.

With that introduction, here is my annotated list of innovation support models for new entity formation:

1. Tech Transfer Office: A department often within a university or governmental institution responsible for identifying promising inventions developed within the institution and finding entrepreneurs interested in licensing the intellectual property at the heart of the inventions for the purposes of commercialization. Tech Transfer Offices (TTOs) support innovation by making inventions accessible to innovators and entrepreneurs (as well as to corporations who seek to innovate their existing offerings, or protect themselves from competitors).?
2. HackerSpace, also known as MakerLab or FabLab: Physical workshop, often open to either the public or a set of members, with shared equipment enabling innovators to build prototypes applying the insights encapsulated in inventions within different form factors that precede the design and development of a product. HackerSpaces support innovation by enabling inventors and innovators to work out the kinks that always occur when translating a theoretical breakthrough into a functioning prototype, and seeing how that prototype performs under real world conditions. Such prototyping is crucial to elucidate the value proposition the invention may offer, enabling entrepreneurs to assess commercial viability, and therefore whether to build a new entity around the innovation.?
3. Venture Studio: A group of individuals who believe they have expertise which, when applied together in cooperation, can be used to invent new approaches to solving a panoply of problems. Studios come in many shapes and sizes, some with associated investment funds and some without, but all come down to the idea of bringing together a group of people who work well together to develop multiple often vastly different approaches to problem solving, where the intention is to spin off the successful ones into their own new entities if and when they reach a particular stage of commercial validation. Studios are both engines of innovation as well as supporters of innovation, able to take in inventors and innovators at their earliest stages and work alongside them to develop a prototype for validation.?
4. Angel Investment Fund: A group of individuals – each an investor in their own right – who pool their money and often their expertise to support new entities financially in their earliest stages of formation. Angel Funds support innovation by providing entrepreneurs the capital they require to test the innovation, and build out the functional roles required to grow a new entity into one that can perform commercially.?
5. Venture Builder: A group of individuals who believe they have sufficient expertise to take externally developed innovations and provide them with the professional support they require to achieve a level of validation that would enable commercial actors to either license the innovation or invest funds to enable commercialization. Builders come in many shapes and sizes, some with associated investment funds and some without, but all come down to the idea of bringing together a group of people who work well together to apply the professional wrapping to an existing innovation to help it achieve validation, and crucially shorten the time of that innovation to market. Builders support innovation by providing a templatized organizational and operational frameworks in order to save significant time in the validation of the innovation.?
6. Testbed or Sandbox: A platform – either physical or digital – able to provide innovations with rigorous testing for the purpose of approach validation. Testbeds enable the innovators to see how their assumptions manage in reliably simulated environments mimicking real-world conditions, to determine whether it is reasonable to claim that the innovation may in fact solves the problem they set out to solve, a different problem, or is not worth investing more time and effort into developing. Testbeds support innovation by creating a reliable, easily accessible means for the validation of innovation, and thereby a signal to entrepreneurs and investors as to whether the innovation should develop further as a new entity.?
7. Accelerator: A short-duration program for new entities whose purpose is to increase the chances of financing for each accepted entity. Accelerators can last anywhere between 3 weeks to 9 months, take in cohorts of new entities grouped together as a portfolio or class, and can work with either for-profit startups or for-purpose charities. Accelerators primarily focus on preparing the new entity leadership to raise money, ending often with a fundraising opportunity masked as a day to demonstrate the offerings of each of the new entities in their portfolio. Accelerators support innovation by improving the chances of capital raising for the entities developing new ideas into a repeatable and scalable set of products or services.?
8. Challenge Competition: A short-duration program generally centered around a single event where entities addressing a set of problems determined by competition organizers compete for the approval of judges nominated by the competition sponsor. Usually a prize is offered. Competitions are generally multi-staged, starting with an open call for applications for entities or efforts seeking to solve a particular problem, and proceeding through a series of steps or rounds whereby the sponsor determines which entities are most aligned with its desired set of solutions and/or the needs of the sponsor. Entities progress in the rounds based on their alignment with the sponsoring organization and its appointed judges, investing their time in the hope of making the final round where, generally, they will be featured by the sponsoring organization and have a chance at winning prizes and gaining public renown. Competitions support innovation by identifying entities advancing solutions aligned with the sponsor’s worldview, raising their profile through the sponsor’s circles, and often providing capital as a prize to those entities chosen.?
9. Venture Capital Fund (for-profit) or Venture Philanthropy Fund (for-purpose): A capital investment vehicle able to take on the risk that the resources it provides a new entity may be squandered, in return for the expectation that a sufficient number of its investments will pay off substantially, offsetting the losses in their impact. In for-profit entities, Venture Capital (VC) does so by purchasing shares in the entity at a far lower price than it intends to sell them after a predefined period of time.? Venture generally specializes in a phase of new entity formation, supporting the transition of a new entity between those phases (for example, from innovation to prototype, from prototype to minimum valuable product (MVP) and first customer, from early customer adoption to scale). Venture supports innovation by providing entities the capital they need to grow into the organizational form that enables repeated problem solving by the entity’s offering.?
10. Incubator: A medium to long-duration program for existing entities who have initially validated their offering, providing a curated set of operational support services to enable entity leadership – often the inventors or the innovators themselves – to focus on further product development and validation. Incubators increase their attractiveness to new entities by developing a deep bench of experts and pool of knowhow enabling individual teams to shortcut processes in their field of innovation. Incubators support innovation by enabling new entities to focus on their particular innovation without needing to build the full organizational backbone non-incubated entities require to conduct regular operations.?
11. Private Equity (for-profit) or Private Foundation (for-purpose): A capital investment vehicle that provides an entity the resources it needs to expand its operations to make its innovation available to a broader public (Venture Capital is a subset of Private Equity, defined separately due to its earlier focus). In for-profit cases, these Funds purchase shares of an entity’s stock for a modicum of control of the entity, which it intends to sell at a later today generally less clearly determined than in VC. Funds support innovation by enabling entities to invest in the infrastructure they require to either make the innovation more appealing to its public, or increase awareness of the innovation to spur adoption and integration into institutions wrestling with the same problem the innovation set out to solve.
12. Living Laboratory: a platform providing real world conditions where entities can test their innovations over time, with a professional backbone providing measurement and evaluation services that have generally accepted credibility. Living Labs support innovation by enabling entities to amass the evidence required to offer products or services delivering their innovations to institutions.?

Hybrid models mixing new and old entities?

1. Open-Innovation: a public call for ideas to solve a well-defined challenge generally run as a competition sponsored by a public institution or private entity. The sponsor provides substantial data about the problem and the sorts of solutions it requires, and generally offers a chance of integrating the preferred solutions into its general operations if the sponsor assesses it meets the institution’s needs. Entrants into the competition may be private individuals or existing entities, and while the purpose of such competitions is to solve an institutional problem the competiton often has an externality of inspiring new entities formed by entrants who see the competition as a signal for a broader market need of such innovation.?
2. Collective Impact: a coalition-based approach to shared problem solving, bringing together a broad base of institutions and entities to address together a shared set of challenges through the development of solutions no one entity could develop on its own. To coordinate the collaboration between groups, a Backbone entity is created to run coalition operations, and measure and evaluate developments to assess whether they meet coalition conditions for success. Collective Impact supports innovation by bringing to bear a vast and varied set of resources on a problem set, frequently spinning off new entities that can serve more than one coalition partner over time.?
3. Policy Lab: a collaborative environment where policy makers, civil servants, academics, and a representative subset of civil society identify shared policy objectives in order to test their implementation through simulation or minimal implementation and assess their impact. By bringing stakeholders who will be affected by a policy direction together in a collaborative process, Policy Labs seek to better understand the unforeseen challenges and consequences, and refine their proposal prior to agency adoption. In response to lessons learned through their participation, stakeholders may develop innovations to either help affected parties transition into the new policy environment, or to address uncovered challenges that they foresee will arise though implementation. Policy Labs support innovation by generating data helpful for all players in the innovation process.?
4. Generator: A structured, easy to implement, timebound methodology that blends the coalition approach of collective impact, the creative elements of a venture studio, and the network effects of challenge competitions. Full disclosure, I developed it as an alternative to accelerators to address public challenges. More info here.

Thank you for reading this far! What am I missing, in your opinion?