Small core team. Enterprise expertise.
Innovation Accelerators are AI-native generalists who guide opportunities from ambiguity to validated, enterprise-ready concepts. They partner with specialists throughout the organization when additional expertise is needed, rather than recreating traditional product teams.
Builds and improves the system rather than executing every engagement. Accountable for the health, quality, and reach of the capability.
- Define and evolve the operating model
- Coach Innovation Accelerators
- Manage the opportunity portfolio
- Build executive partnerships
- Measure capability outcomes
- Improve playbooks, templates, and tooling
- Identify opportunities to scale the capability
The primary practitioners. An AI-native generalists who owns an opportunity from intake through handoff, engaging specialists as the work requires.
- Meet with business stakeholders
- Frame the problem and name the riskiest assumption
- Build prototypes using AI-first tools like Lovable
- Run prototype-led validation sessions
- Run Readiness assessments
- Package handoffs with a clear recommendation
- Coordinate with specialists when needed
Enterprise expertise, engaged as needed.
Supporting Partners are specialists across the organization who lend expertise to accelerator engagements. They are collaborators — not permanent members of the Innovation Accelerator capability — and are pulled in based on what an opportunity requires.
Accelerators own everything before commitment. FDEs own everything after.
Innovation Accelerators collapse the decide seam — the handoffs between thinking, prototyping, and validating — so the org can answer whether to build and what exactly to build. Assumes no commitment.
Forward Deployed Engineers collapse the build seam — the handoffs between PM, design, and engineering — so a committed bet ships in production, embedded with the customer. Assumes the bet is already made.
The Accelerator's Handoff artifact — evidence pack, recommendation, and readiness report — is the FDE's brief. FDEs may also be pulled in as Supporting Partners during Readiness to sanity-check feasibility, scale, and ops before the invest call.