Do accelerators produce better start-up companies? And what are they anyhow?

My first real engagement with such initiatives was more than 10 years ago, when I became a partner in a business in the City of London called Metrocube. It managed two buildings housing new-tech and media companies. At heart we offered serviced office space, but mainly appealed to start-ups that liked to work alongside similar entrepreneurial businesses. Sadly, the bursting of the dotcom bubble did for Metrocube, which we sold; but the model demonstrated how start-ups benefit from being part of a community of strivers.

Our company could have been labelled an incubator, which is apparently different from an accelerator. According to The Startup Factories, a report published by Nesta last year, accelerators make a pre-seed investment for equity, and develop cohorts of start-ups rather than individual companies, which move on after a short period of intensive support. The declining expense of technology – hardware costs have fallen by a factor of 100 over the past decade – means companies can be started with little capital.