Pre-Accelerator Co-Design Sprint

Due to limited places, this session is by invitation only.

During this co-design sprint we will collectively explore different Impact Investment and Pre-Accelerators Models, specifically in rural and remote contexts. Facilitated by Arthur Steiner, Martijn Blom, and Safa Omrani, the session convenes maximum 15 participants, including cultural entrepreneurs, intermediaries, and impact investors, to imagine new ways of supporting artistic entrepreneurship in rural and remote areas. 

The workshop unfolds over two interconnected sessions:

Session 1 – Thursday, 13 November (16:00–18:00)

Session 2 – Friday, 14 November (10:00–13:00)

During these sessions, Martijn, Arthur and Safa will present various pre-accelerator and fund models that they investigated during their research commissioned by DOEN Foundation and for UNESCO, followed by a collective space for mapping existing accelerator and impact investment models, specifically in rural and remote context. Through guided discussions and group interactions, we will identify patterns of success, common challenges of these models. The session will also include collaborative sketching to visualise and prototype possible models for a pre-accelerator and an impact fund. 

Background context

Pre-accelerator programs have emerged over the past two decades as an upstream format responding to structural needs to encourage aspiring entrepreneurs in the early stages of their business development. Pre-accelerator programs aim at supporting the idea stage of development with a strong educational component, a focus on teamwork, and having positive impact on the ecosystems around them. Participants start with (or without) scattered ideas that change and evolve during the program. Most often they can enter individually, and teams are formed from interactions within the cohort. PACESETTERS Real World Laboratories are designed as proof of concept, translating the entire bandwidth of participatory practices into specific local contexts in order to develop collective responses to the climate crisis — through strategies of collocation, cooperation and collaboration. 
 

PACESETTERS is currently developing a model to boost artistic and creative entrepreneurship across sectoral divides. It draws from the principles and experiences of state-of-the-art pre-accelerator programs, build on the preliminary outcomes of the creative case studies and the experiments in three real-world laboratories. As a tailor-made laboratory format for the CCIs, fully embedded in local and social contexts. This approach allows for the exploration and assessment of the specific constraints and potentials of creative communities and networks to explore and practically experience the pre-conditions for change on systems level. It also provides possibilities to investigate social dynamics on a micro-level in order to learn what drives change beyond (or beside) profit, such as climate justice, community building, a sense of belonging, mutual care and aspiration.