Activate and The Engine Accelerator team up to train scientists to become founders

The path from scientist to founder is well-trodden, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. These pitfalls are why, over the past decade, several programs have emerged to ease the path for technical founders.

Now two important programs, Enable And The engine acceleratordecided they could give the founders an even bigger advantage if they teamed up.

“It felt like the closer we could get, the more we could work together, the more we could feed off each other’s programs and ultimately see more results from these proto-founders to entrepreneurs,” Emily Knight , CEO of The Engine. Accelerator, told TechCrunch.

The two programs are complementary in many ways. The Engine works with scientists and engineers who are just beginning to explore commercialize their researchhence their status as “proto-founders”. Activate milestones when founders have further refined their ideas and offer them two-year fellowships to prepare them for fundraising.

A significant number of proto-founders who completed the recent Blueprint program run by The Engine ended up being awarded an Activate Fellowship. “It’s not a universal truth, but what we’re seeing is that Blueprint participants are better prepared for Activate,” Cyrus Wadia, CEO of Activate, told TechCrunch. “My team asked: Can we get more? »

The partnership is still in its early stages. No money has changed hands, and the two are not yet at the point where they are considering merging. “It’s too early to talk about it,” Knight said.

For now, they’re looking to exchange notes on their programs to see where they can fill in the gaps. They will maintain separate application and admissions streams for the time being, although it is possible that something like the college’s “Common Application” could develop for founders who might find both programs useful.

Ultimately, Knight and Wadia said the alliance was an attempt to quickly get more technical founders in place.

“We have normalized too slow a pace, especially when we talk about climate,” Wadia said. “If we have a chance to get a scientist on this path to new successes more quickly, then it’s well worth the time and investment to get there.”