The time when an incubator passage was enough to credibility an entrepreneurial project is over. As their number exploded, their initial role has diluted. What was to be a targeted place of support has often become a hybrid space, between valued coworking and project counters. The label of Incubes, formerly reserved for handpicked profiles, is commonplace as the devices are industrialized. Faced with this evolution, many emerging companies, including on mature markets, are looking for other ways to structure themselves efficiently, based on concrete resources, not on showcase effects.
The decline in training effects
When it started, the HEC incubator program represented a selective launch ramp, strongly backed by a network of mentors and priority access to the first circles of investors. This model has proven itself for technological companies with significant financing needs. But this mechanism requires alchemy of time and context. When the flow of projects intensifies and the selection loses in demand, the training effect fades. Project leaders are found in an environment certainly stimulating, but not very personalized, where differentiation is drowned in the mass.
As cohorts widen, support teams are struggling to maintain a fine knowledge of individual issues. The exchange loses in depth, the recommendations are generalized, and the feeling of advancing blindly settles. The density of profiles, supposed to encourage emulation, sometimes generates a counter-productive latent competition, and dilutes the attention paid to each project. In the absence of sufficiently sophisticated educational resources or rigorous monitoring, the founders experience blockages that no standardized program allows you to overcome. In this context, the incubator becomes a simple logistics framework, useful in the short term, but ineffective to build a solid and durable trajectory.
The return to structures on a human scale
More and more entrepreneurs are choosing to turn away from these widened ecosystems to join limited environments, often anchored in a trade, where support is based on an artisanal logic more than on frozen programs. This is what the MAIF initiated through its lab, a system turned towards the concrete experimentation of projects related to the impact economy. Far from the generic speeches, the teams are directly integrated into the trades, with short validation cycles, and a constant proximity to the group’s operational teams.
The reduced scale allows a fluid relationship, an ability to quickly adjust the objectives, and a reactivity that massified structures can no longer guarantee. This model, more frugal but also more demanding, attracts profiles which seek less to accelerate their visibility than to validate a value proposal in real conditions. Access to qualified user feedback, an operational infrastructure, and stable partners becomes a much more decisive structuring factor than an institutional label. This immersion in a constrained test/adjustment logic offers a credible alternative to conventional incubation, too often centered on storytelling rather than on market validation.
Regain control over your trajectory
Finding a support framework does not mean delegating the strategy. More and more entrepreneurs are structuring their development around a pair of targeted experts, whether it is a specialized legal advice, a sectoral expert or a financial referent. This is the path chosen by the founders of Back Market, long before their major fundraising. Rather than being part of a marked course, they structured their growth around an ecosystem chosen, without going through traditional incubators. This selective companionship model, based on the quality of the interlocutors more than on the scope of the system, made it possible to keep a clear strategic line from the first stages.
This type of structuring implies strong decision-making maturity and an ability to manage complexity yourself. It is not a question of advancing alone, but of finely selecting the mobilized resources, of articulating them with consistency, and of maintaining the course on the creation of value. This posture presupposes a high degree of autonomy and an ability to prioritize priorities without giving in to the fashion effect. Entrepreneurs who take part of it are generally those who have a precise vision of their product and their market, and who seek to build a business before building a community of interest. The support sought is then punctual, specialized, and results oriented. Far from a pre -established program, it is an à la carte structuring, driven directly by the real needs of the project.
Locked up to an industrial player rather than a generic structure
Several young companies in the launch phase prefer to get closer to a well -established player in their sector, in a logic of asymmetrical, but concrete partnership. Crédit Agricole, via its BY CA villages, has changed its proposal so that the companies hosted are not only surrounded by other startups, but put in direct contact with subsidiaries or customers of the group. This bridge between emerging innovation and large accounts makes it possible to structure an economic model from the first phases, without waiting for a hypothetical fundraising.
The search for concrete results prevailing the effects of communication. In other cases, such as that of Bouygues Telecom, collaboration initiatives with young shoots target well -defined use cases, short -term integrable in group offers. Far from speculative logics, these are co -development opportunities, in a clear contractual framework. The partner company becomes both experimental field, industrial sponsor and credibility lever. This demanding but directly productive approach, seduces entrepreneurs who seek to build a viable solution before building a brand. The partnership is no longer thought of as an institutional backing, but as an operational traction lever, immediately activated.
