INCUBATOR
Driving innovation
There is no better way to live our entrepreneurial values than by becoming real-life entrepreneurs. Our consultants launch their own start-ups through the Gate One Incubator. Few other consultancies put their money where their mouth is and make this happen.
Launching a start-up tests creativity, leadership and grit like nothing else. These qualities set our consultants apart from our competitors and directly benefit your business. The experience of creation, experimentation and ownership ignites a wonderful passion in our staff and helps us solve problems like no-one else. We can deploy our Incubator toolkit or we can even take it a step further and replicate our full Incubator as a service for our clients.
Empowering our team
Through the Gate One Incubator, we support our team to become founder-investors in our growing portfolio of start-ups. At any given time, we have a diverse range of businesses at each of the four stage gates, namely:
Ideation
Encouraging divergent and convergent thinking to come up with problems worth solving and how we might solve them. No idea is a bad idea.
Proof of concept
Carrying out market research and competitor analysis to see where the solution fits in the market. Prove the idea has a place in the market.
Minimum viable product (MVP)
Building the first iteration of the solution and testing it with the market. Use findings to build a scalable business model.
Accelerate
Carrying out your MVP learnings to hone your solution and do a full-scale launch. Continue to grow the business to achieve product-market fit.
Inflight businesses
Meet some of our team
Pamela is a life sciences value creation, strategic growth and acquisition advisory specialist focused on delivering impressive outcomes for businesses, their employees and their customers. She has a PhD in medical sciences and an executive MBA (both from the University of Oxford). Her career spans drug development, strategy and management consulting within the global healthcare and pharmaceutical arenas.
As head of incubator, Kajal is responsible for driving Gate One’s flagship Incubator forward and supporting the fantastic entrepreneurs and businesses in the scheme. Kajal has seven years’ experience in start-up enterprise, most recently as head of projects at Business Launchpad and prior to that as a business advisor with Virgin Start-Up. Her recent clients included a web platform for decluttering services, a Caribbean street food business and a luxury nut butter company. She is an entrepreneur herself, having previously set up and run a luxury shoe business in New York, which she grew to $300,000 pa turnover.
Ash has a strong background in M&A, having worked as a consultant across a number of deals and has previously worked in a private equity-focused transaction services team in a big four firm. He is CIMA qualified, finishing first in the world in his management case study. Ash has a strong passion for entrepreneurship, which he exercises through his role as deputy head of the Incubator and his snack start up, Plant Pops. Plant Pops won ‘Snacking Innovation of the Year in 2019′, and Ash and his co-founder were listed among the ’15 Food Entrepreneurs to Watch in 2021’ at the Great British Entrepreneur Awards.
James is the Gate One US lead, responsible for recruitment, strategy, business development and operations. James specialises in large-scale IT-enabled change and enterprise portfolio management. He has delivered complex transformation programs across multiple industries. Most recently, James was program director for digital transformation at the UK’s largest grocer.
If you would like to speak to us about our Gate One Incubator programme, or innovation more generally, please contact James Cumberland.
