Producing high quality innovation

[Sponsored article] Having set the objective of launching over 200 new start-ups in the next five years, co-founder and CEO of Founders Factory, Henry Lane Fox set out to find the entrepreneurs who can survive in the long-run.

As an accelerator, Founders Factory helps businesses scale up. They invite groups of 30 start-ups to their offices for six months at a time, invest seed capital and lend them resources, provide access to a global network of top experts and corporate partners in the six sectors of travel, beauty, media, education technology, financial technology and artificial intelligence (AI).

The success rate of these companies in raising funds is over 60 per cent, according to Lane Fox, who was speaking at the Innovation and Impact Summit 2017 organised by Times Higher Education in partnership with The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

As an incubator, Founders Factory helps build new businesses. They source ideas with corporate partners, bring in founding teams, build products from prototyping over 120 technologies each year and, ultimately, give birth to new businesses.

It became clear to Lane Fox that success depends on having strong core teams. In order to scale up their start-ups within the next few years, Founders Factory will need close to 1,000 experienced and passionate entrepreneurs. The challenge, as always, was finding elite talent.

To this end, he has been looking to build an AI-based solution to this challenge. They scoured websites such as LinkedIn, CrunchBase, AngelList for career paths of very successful entrepreneurs, and also talked to HR from whom they received some great recommendations.