The Growth Academy is a joint initiative of the Imperial Lab for Entrepreneurship Research and Blenheim Chalcot to support venture leaders with the challenges of scaling up their business. It is both a training programme designed to help venture leaders reflect on how they can best allocate their resources to catalyse growth, and a research project aimed at gaining insight into venture scale-up.
The transition from startup to scaleup is rife with challenges, with the role of venture leaders gradually morphing from entrepreneur to manager. The objective of this study is to understand how CEOs and other C-level executives of startups allocate their time across different activities, and how they mobilise their networks as their companies grow.
FAQs
The Growth Academy is free and exclusive to ScaleSpace and I-Hub ventures. The programme is designed to help venture leaders reflect on time use and network challenges at the transition from startup to scaleup or during scaleup, and we encourage ventures in earlier stages of development to take part in future iterations of the programme.
The programme will help answer important questions around how team members divide and coordinate tasks and responsibilities, and we encourage the full C-suite leadership team to take part.
Core business objectives shift from exploration and optimising product-market fit to exploitation and scaling. At this point, it is important to consider the challenges around how venture leaders use their time and employ their networks.
The day-to-day decisions on how you use your time and networks – and how to coordinate these among the team of venture leaders – will likely have a major impact on how your venture scales.
The Growth Academy will help you reflect on:
- how your day-to-day interactions enable you to recruit and manage a diverse team,
- how you can best coordinate the management of key strategic relations with other members of your venture team, and
- how to prioritise your different work task in light of your venture’s growth objectives.
The Growth Academy will also help to promote community building among venture leaders in and around ScaleSpace and I-Hub.
The Growth Academy is a one-year programme that runs from May 2022 to May 2023. The programme is expected to run again from May 2023 to May 2024.
We will ask you and other senior leaders in your venture team to complete a network and time use survey three times over the course of the year. This will amount to 90 minutes of your time over the calendar year.
We will schedule three 30-minute appointments with you, during which a researcher will guide you through the survey. These sessions will be in May 2022, November 2022 and May 2023 and will be organised at a time and place convenient for you.
We also offer the following optional community-building and training events:
- The programme will kick off with an onboarding event in May 2022. This will be an opportunity to get to know the organisers and other participants in your cohort, and to learn more about the programme.
- An informal mid-programme networking event in November 2022. Around the time of the second survey appointment in November 2022, you will have an opportunity to socialise with members of the Growth Academy cohort and catch up with the study organisers.
- The programme will close with a half-day training event in May 2023. Imperial College Business School faculty members involved in the Growth Academy study will offer a training session. The training session will focus on how venture leaders can best use their time and their networks to enable scale-up.
For each survey you will receive a detailed report that documents your time use and network, benchmarked against other venture leaders in the cohort. This will help you reflect on your leadership role, as well as provide a discussion point to share with other senior leaders on coordinating work tasks and networking activities.
The three network and time use reports you collect over the year will form the basis of the training session that concludes the study.
You also will receive a media branding kit to indicate your venture’s membership in the Growth Academy of Imperial College on your website or other social media outlets.
The research team regularly works with confidential data. They commit to the following steps to protect your identity and data:
- Never sharing any personally identifiable data used in the data collection with any other researcher beyond the team, or to use it for any other purpose than the study in hand without explicit permission.
- Storing all information in a secure environment, with all person-identifying information (PII) transformed into a unique ID that enables matching in the future.
- Ensuring that all data that is reported is sufficiently aggregated so as to safeguard that results are no different from anonymous from the perspective of the reader.
The survey data will be linked to data on venture outcomes such as revenue growth, recruitment, and cash flow and data on demographic characteristics of the venture leaders for each of the ventures on the programme.
This data will be obtained from Blenheim Chalcot where applicable or sourced from databases such as Pitchbook and Crunchbase. These data will be linked to the survey responses using the transformed ID that does not have PII.
Find more details about how we process data and how we safeguard your anonymity for this project here.
Project team
Find out more about the team behind the Growth Academy