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Accenture collaborated with the Founder Institute to launch an internal innovation program that enabled high-performing employees to build startups without leaving the company.
Accenture is a premier management consulting, technology services, and outsourcing company that helps clients become high-performance businesses and governments. They have worked with companies such as Oracle, NBC, and Nestle and represented many other companies at various stages of development.
In 2013, Accenture partnered with the Founder Institute to empower top-performing employees who were considering launching startups. Select staff joined the Brussels program as “Innovation Fellows,” gaining mentorship and startup training without leaving their jobs. This generated stronger talent retention, enhanced entrepreneurial skills, and the successful spinoff of Geniefacts, with Accenture holding equity.
Accenture faced a growing risk: several high-value employees were on the verge of exiting the company to launch startups. While this entrepreneurial ambition was admirable, it threatened to drain the company of some of its most innovative talent.
At the same time, fostering internal innovation in a company the size of Accenture posed its own challenges. There were limited structured tracks for employees to explore venture creation within the safety of the organization and a lack of scalable ways to support early-stage startup development.
Accenture needed a solution to retain entrepreneurial talent, foster internal innovation, and offer a structured, results-driven program for building startups.
To address these challenges, the Founder Institute and Accenture launched a customized intrapreneurship program built on FI’s proven accelerator model:
Accenture identified six high-performing employees and enrolled them in the Brussels Founder Institute as Innovation Fellows. This allowed them to explore entrepreneurial ideas while staying fully employed.
Participants operated in a separate track, keeping their ideas confidential from the broader cohort while benefiting from full access to the Founder Institute’s structured curriculum and mentorship. After 2 years, 4 participants remained at Accenture, while the other successfully spun out ‘Geniefacts’, a big data platform for enterprises to analyze data across company silos.
Fellows worked with top mentors from Silicon Valley and across Europe, receiving hands-on guidance in idea validation, business modeling, and go-to-market strategy.
The Founder Institute helped Accenture create a simple legal mechanism to take 4% equity in any new business created through the program, aligning incentives for both employees and the employer.
The Accenture-Founder Institute collaboration demonstrated that structured intrapreneurship can retain talent, drive innovation, and create opportunities for spinoffs aligned with the parent company’s goals.
Accenture's "entrepreneurial sandbox" program with the Founder Institute delivered measurable impact.
Geniefacts made it much easier to identify trends from our yearly market survey. Now we have a single solution to connect and analyze our raw data and present it in a way that our clients understand.
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The Founder Institute (FI.co) is the world's largest pre-seed startup accelerator. Since 2009, we have helped tens of thousands of employees and new/ idea-stage entrepreneurs validate, test, and launch startups worth an estimated $30BN+. Our mission is to activate and empower talented and motivated entrepreneurs to build meaningful technology businesses worldwide
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