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Gig Economy: Transformation of Employees to Contractors

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/case-against-full-time-employees-dave-ashton

The Case Against Full-Time Employees

Aug 19, 2015

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By Dave Aston, Founder, SnapCar

"A lot of people are convinced that a lot of people should be paid a lot less, but I'm pretty sure everyone I've ever met thinks they should be paid a lot more. I think some people are going to end up unhappy."

     ~ My buddy Dan 

"Gig jobs" - the newest term for the employment of freelancers or independent contractors - are invoking a lot of discussion these days. Companies like Lyft, TaskRabbit, Upwork and many others are frequently criticized for providing services delivered by independent (or even unlicensed) contractors. Some journalists are raising terrifying claims about how the sky is falling because "full-time employment is dying and soon we'll all be obsolete". It's as if by 2020 we'll be out on the street, penniless and begging a parasol-carrying bourgeois couple to let us run them across town in a rickshaw so we can earn a few tuppence for tonight's pudding.

A lot of people are buying into the fearmongering. They shouldn't. 

The debate even seems to be impacting employment models of companies that probably should be using a lot of independent contractors: Shyp recently made the risky - and costly -  decision to hire its delivery workers as full time employees; it feels like AirBnB - whose owner-hosts certainly don't pay employment taxes - is being sued in every city it operates; Sprig and Blue Apron must face the dilemma of do we hire full time people or do we pay contractors piecemeal?; Gravity Payments finds itself in an odd situation after guaranteeinggreat minimum salaries for all its full-time employees, a choice that appears to be costing it more than just money; and Zirtual shut down at least in part because it hired full-time employees...and hopes to relaunch using independent contractors.

Hotels hate AirBnB. Taxis hate SnapCar. Trains hate BlaBlaCar. Restaurants hate Sprig. Cleaning services hate TaskRabbit. This hate and debate - about an employment model that disrupts or destroys entrenched businesses - is increasingly focused on the use of independent contractors. 

I'm caught in the middle. As a consumer but also founder of a company that has created or contributed to the development of several thousand independent contractor jobs in Paris over the last couple of years, I want to explain here why "gig economy jobs" will continue to comprise an outsized percentage of global jobs growth in the coming years.

Many jobs - particularly highly-skilled or managerial ones - will always be better served by full-time employees than by independent contractors. And there's no question full-time jobs will remain the preferred employment method for a majority of employers and workers alike. Every company needs dedicated resources that focus all their work energy on a single set of responsibilities. You can't run and grow a company if you don't have dedicated workers, and by definition independent contractors are free to work for anyone they wish.

But at the most basic level gig economy jobs are exploding because there weren't enough of them in the first place. And because this paradigm is demonstrating that for certain types of jobs there are more efficient ways of allocating resources, leading to better services for customers, more money for contractors than they might make elsewhere, and indirect benefits to consumers because of productivity boosts to economies.

In the past, the complexity/impossibility of resource pooling made it too hard for most companies to use independent contractors on any large scale, even though many could really have benefited from doing so. So consumers paid more than we should have for products and services provided by people who were full-time employees, but who didn't really need to be to serve us appropriately. The traditional model has cost you money your whole life because in certain cases it's less efficient than an economic model based on pooling independent resources to provide services that many people need/want.

We know now that you don't need to pay for a full time driver to get a quality ride on demand; or stay in a dedicated hotel to find a great place to sleep; or hire a full-time maid to have your house/apartment cleaned; or have a full-time chef to get a quality meal prepared and delivered straight to you. These kinds of services, which in many cases were previously price-inaccessible to all but the wealthy, are now consumed by a much larger set of people around the world because the resources that supply those services can be federated across a broader demand market.

It's mostly thanks to technology. Geolocalization has enabled what is truly a revolution: the virtually costless pooling of supply-side resources. It's the pooling that foments greater supply and incites demand from a broad audience, enabling independent contractors to earn a living in ways they previously could not. That, along with the demand you provide for their services, is what is attracting them to gig economy jobs.

But gig job growth isn't just often great for the worker who might otherwise find himself unemployed, it's also great for employers (though not so good for governments. Perhaps more on that some other time).

Which means that sometimes hiring full-time workers is a terrible idea.

In most countries there is a significant cost difference for an employer to use full-time employees versus independent workers. The figures may shock you. Here's a real, typical example from France:

Yes...It frequently costs significantly more to hire a full-time employee than it costs to hire an independent contractor to do exactly the same job. In the United States the cost difference may not be as stark as in Europe but it is still significant.

And yet in many cases an independent contractor takes home more money at the end of the month than if he was employed full-time. Because payroll and income taxes are generally lower for independent contractors than for full-time employees (laws vary from country to country) and because if a contractor works more he usually makes more. And he's free to work more (or less).

But beyond salaries and taxes there are other significant advantages to employing - and being - an independent contractor: the worker works when and for whom he wishes. And he can work for more than one company at a time. So if he makes 1800€ a month from SnapCar he might also make that amount from a competitor, like Uber. This motivates SnapCar - and Uber - to pay the driver as well as possible in an effort to win his loyalty. It's not necessarily a race to the top but I can promise it's anything but a race to the bottom. 

There is more. The independent worker can have additional, separate jobs on the side. He takes vacations/holidays when he wants. And perhaps the most important element: the barriers to entry for contractor jobs are often not particularly high. So less experienced people and/or those lacking a strong financial footing can often still find work right away. This is a hugely valuable opportunity for many. It's not for everyone but it helps many. 

There are some very real drawbacks: the most glaring of which that ob security is lower than in a full-time role - at least theoretically. An independent contractor also has no guaranteed daily/monthly income. It's possible he could work a ten hour day and make nothing, although this essentially never happens. He's not paid for taking vacations. If his performance is poor or demand dries up he can find himself unable to earn a living. He must buy his own health insurance or perhaps supplemental health insurance (in France all basic health care is paid by the government, funded by payroll taxes. Hence payroll taxes here are 3-4x higher than in the United States).

He also doesn't get to hang out with his colleagues by the water cooler. He won't be paid for playing World of Warcraft during board meetings (like American hero Brian Roddy who was so brilliant he could get away with it) or for watching Yadier Molina win another game for the world's greatest sports franchise and make me fall in love with him all over again. He doesn't get to go to any obligatory work meetings. He doesn't attend company training sessions.

Wait, are those drawbacks...?

Because the worker isn't earning when he's not working, he tends to be motivated to work. Hard. So independent contractors can often be more driven than salaried employees: their primary motivation is to do a job sufficiently well today so they'll make even more tomorrow. And via customer-based rating systems the service providers - SnapCar, TaskRabbit, AirBnB, etc - automatically know who the best independent contractors are, and are motivated to keep them.

In France, where it can cost a year's salary to remove an unmotivated salaried employee, a motivated independent worker is a beautiful thing. Imagine you have a full-time employee who starts refusing to come to work because he knows if he's fired the law requires he be paid six months of salary (or more). With an independent worker this issue doesn't exist. If he's highly-rated by customers he stays and can make a good living. If he's poorly-rated he'll probably have a harder time finding work.

This freedom to work or not, to employ or not, to consume or not, creates a liquidity in the labor market that is healthy and generally good for employers, employees and consumers alike.

Thanks to the costless supply-side resource pooling revolution, independent workers now cost less without necessarily making less, so the services they provide can be consumed less expensively. We all end up taking more SnapCar rides, getting more dry cleaning deliveries from TaskRabbit, more personal assistant services from Zirtual (until it died because they hired full-time employees), and faster medical services via DoctorOnDemand. That thing is going to take over the world. 

You wouldn't consume those services if you didn't want to: you're free to choose. If you believe the fearmongering then it's probably best for you to pay for hotels rather than for Airbnb, for full-time limousine companies instead of SnapCar (or taxis), and to hire a permanent engineer with five weeks' vacation to build that app you've been telling your friends about.

But that's not what consumers are doing, which probably means that consumption of services from independent contractors makes their lives better. And since the independent contractors are equally free to offer their services or not - and here they are, offering them on an unprecedented scale - it probably makes for a better life for many of them, too. As soon as it stops working for you, you'll stop buying. As soon as it doesn't work for your driver, he'll stop supplying. So be nice to him. He'll be nice to you, and you'll get where you need to go. 

Because everybody needs to get somewhere.

The Sharing Economy: An Encore Presentation - Home | Under The Influence with Terry O'Reilly | CBC Radio

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/undertheinfluence/the-sharing-economy-an-encore-presentation-1.2983680

Tuesday July 21, 2015

The Sharing Economy

By Terry O'Rielly, CBC Radio

As the Sharing Economy grows, everybody wins - except marketers.

The is only one fate worse than death. And that… is moving. The reason moving is so painful, of course, is because you suddenly rediscover all your stuff. You never really know how much stuff you have until you have to move it. Because we are a society of consumers, we have now become a society of storage renters.

Nearly one in ten households in the U.S. rents a storage unit. That represents a 65% increase since the year 2000. 60% of those renters already own a garage, 47% have an attic, and 33% have a basement – yet they still feel the need to rent additional space. The country with the biggest self-storage industry in the world outside the United States? That would be Canada.

There is currently about 2.3 billion square feet, or 210 million square meters, of storage space available in North America. In other words, it's an area three times the size of Manhattan Island. 

There's an extraordinary amount of unused stuff sitting idle in storage facilities. We have so much stuff in our lives that the self-storage industry has been the fastest growing sector in commercial real-estate over the last 35 years. But an interesting shift is afoot. One storage facility owners aren't happy about. It's a movement that resists ownership. A movement where people are happy to borrow when they need things. They are happy to rent out their apartments to people they don't know, or accept rides from complete strangers, or share power tools with people they've never met.

It's called… The Sharing Economy.

And it has already worked its way into automobiles, accommodation, transit, food, clothing, home improvement and even employment.

It's a brand new world of transactions where everybody wins… except marketers.

The Sharing Economy has two main elements. Either the sharing of goods, or the sharing of services. That's why it's also called the P2P market, or Peer-To-Peer, because it eliminates the need for traditional, big corporations. It's a person-to-person transaction. In a nutshell, it's the sharing, bartering, lending, trading or swapping of goods without having to own them. Rachel Botsman, who wrote an excellent book on the subject entitled, What's Mine Is Yours, explains it this way: She says: Sharing products without owning them is based primarily on products with a "high-idling capacity."

For example, there are over 80 million power drills in North American homes. I own one. Do you know the total time an average power drill will be used in its lifetime? 13 minutes. In its lifetime.

Do you own a car? Chances are your car will sit in your driveway 23 hours a day. That's the definition of "idling capacity" – many of the products in our lives simply sit idle and unused. And that's why people in North America spend $20 billion on storage facilities. So it begs the question - Why own a drill when you can just borrow one once in a while? The average car costs about $8K a year to run. So the sharing economy asks: Why own a car when you can just share a car with someone else?

From this thinking, new companies have been born.

For example, if you want to borrow that drill, you could log onto to Neighborgoods.net. It's a website that connects people with items to people who need items. The best part is, the Neighborgoods website facilitates the transaction by connecting you with someone in or near your neighbourhood and charges nothing. Its mission – to help people conserve resources and live more connected lives. In cities like Toronto or Halifax, you can borrow that drill from the Tool Library.com. For a membership of just $50 a year, you have unlimited access to tools big and small. There are 40 tool libraries in the U.S. and a half-dozen in Canada.You also have the option of swapping goods. There are many websites like SwapItShop.com or SwapSity.ca, that connect you to people who have goods they want to trade. So, if you have the box-set of season two of the TV series 24, you can post that you want to swap it for, say, a toaster. Then wait for a reply. What you're seeing here is a lot of goods changing hands, and none of it involves a traditional corporation, a brand, or even a marketer, for that matter.

Let's talk car ownership. For decades, you only had a few choices. You can buy a car. Lease a car. Or rent a car. Then along came companies like ZipCar. Suddenly, you could rent cars by the hour, or even for an hour, instead of by-the-day – a concept that revolutionized the car rental industry. While ZipCar is not a "sharing site" per se, it did begin to alter the mindset of car ownership. Many people now had the option to rent a car for occasional errands, instead of owning a car that sat idle for most of the day. The Washington Post just reported that the U.S. government experimented with ZipCars. Instead of maintaining a fleet of 200,000 vehicles at a cost of $430M, government employees who only need cars for a few hours will now rent Zipcars, or use other car-sharing sites helping the government shave millions off transportation budgets.

It's not good news for big auto manufacturers, who count on fleet sales to the government. Rachel Botsman tells of an fascinating study ZipCar did in 2009. ZipCar took 250 self-confessed car addicts from 13 cities and convinced them to surrender their keys for a month. So if they wanted to go somewhere, they had to walk, bike, or take transit. After one month: Participants collectively lost 413 pounds. Distances biked increased 132%. And distances walked increased 93%. But here was the amazing stat: 100 of the 250 participants did not want their keys back. Remember, these were car-addicts. And they had lost their urge to own. That wasn't just an interesting stat, it was a revelation. Suddenly, new online companies launched to serve that growing segment of the population who no longer want to possess a car. One is called Uber, where you can use an app to hire private cabs and towncar services. An offshoot of Uber is called UberX. You simply tap the UberX app on your smartphone - it knows exactly where you are due to GPS location data – and you can watch a clock count down how many minutes it will take for the UberX car to reach you. UberX says its fares are about 40% cheaper than cabs. And here's why: All the vehicles are driven by vetted, regular people in their own private cars. Not cabs. Regular people in their own cars. And when you're dropped off at your location, no cash is exchanged. The fare and tip are automatically added to your credit card. Uber is growing at an incredible pace, and is already valued at $40 billion. As of this writing, it provides just over one million rides a day, and is now in 53 countries and 250 cities. With those numbers, the big losers, of course, are cab and limo companies. In the States, another car service is called Lyft. It monetizes empty seats, connecting regular people with cars to fee-paying passengers. In the beginning, all LYFT cars had big, furry, pink moustaches attached to the grill.  It was a humorous way to differentiate the brand in the marketplace. But, as the car sharing service matures, it has now eliminated the furry exterior stach and opted instead, for a small glowing one mounted on the dash. You're also told a little about the drivers who offer to pick you up. Once inside a Lyft car, you'll always be greeted the same way - the driver will fist-bump you. It's a Lyft tradition. And like UberX, the fare is charged to your credit card. Peer-to-peer. No cab or taxi company involved. If you want to rent out your own car that's sitting idle in your driveway – you can list your car with RelayRides.com in the States. The website will rent your car out for you, and give you 75% of the rental charge – which is found money for you, and a bargain for renters, because it's still cheaper then renting from an established rental company. That's great news for everybody… except Avis, Hertz, Budget and the rest of the car rental category. If you want to car-pool in the sharing economy, you can use LiveRides.com here in Canada. Download the app, then you have the choice of carpooling to work or school with a friendly stranger. You're sharing the passenger seat, and the driver is earning money going the route they were already going anyway. Everybody wins. Everybody, that is… except cab, limo companies and public transit. Oh, and the major car companies. By the way, when the major car manufacturers were being bailed out by the government, car sharing memberships increased 51%.

A site called SharedEarth.com matches people with land to share, with people who want to grow things. Gardeners get free access to backyards by sharing what they grow with the owners. Within three months of its launch, 29 million square feet of land had been shared.

There are really two fundamental building blocks of the sharing economy: One is the belief that access trumps ownership. The other is trust among strangers. All sharing sites use reputations as currency. Borrowers rate lenders, lenders rate borrowers, and you can flag another member's account if something goes wrong. Those two concepts had their roots in two things: A generational attitude shift, and an economic downturn…

When the Great Recession hit a few years back, many people lost their jobs, some lost their homes, and the way most people lived was completely recalibrated.

Job insecurity and fear of making big, expensive purchases changed people's behaviour. Virtually every one of the sharing sites I'm talking about today was started during - or immediately after - the last recession. Then there is the demographic impact. The Millennial generation, born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s, are a larger group than the baby boomers. And by 2030, they will make up 75% of the buying public globally.Along with that clout comes a unique way of looking at the world. They don't see ownership as empowerment, they see it as a burden. They want the movie, but not the DVD. They want the music, but not the CD. They want the ride, but not the car. Not only do they not want ownership, they don't want the responsibility of ownership. As the New York Times recently said, the only thing they want to own is their reputation. A good reputation is like having a giant key that will open multiple doors. Young people just don't want to own the door. Many Millennials watched their parents struggle through the recession, and they, themselves, are still having a difficult time finding stable jobs in a post-recession economy. As a result, they have been culturally programmed to rent, borrow and share. And the sharing economy is giving them options.

Take a website called TaskRabbit.  Essentially, it's an online marketplace for chores. If you need your laundry picked up, or your garden weeded, or a piece of Ikea furniture assembled, you post that request, and vetted people, or "Rabbits," will respond within 30 minutes. Each will offer different skills and rates, and you pick the person you want. TaskRabbit now offers 30,000 Rabbits in select American cities. It is the perfect definition of the sharing economy - offering the efficiency of matching people with money and no time, with people with time and no money. Here in Canada, you can log onto kutoto.com, or askfortask.com.

If the sharing economy still seems too new and unproven to you, know that venture capitalists have invested heavily. And one of their biggest investments to date is in a sharing site called AirBnB. One day, two design grads in San Francisco figured they could make a few extra bucks by offering airbeds in their loft to people who were attending a design conference in the city. So they set up a website called Air Bed and Breakfast.com - and made $1,000 in one week. With that sudden success, the two grads decided to max out their credit cards and build a bigger site with more listings beyond their own apartment. When Obama spoke at the 2008 Democratic convention in Denver, 75,000 people were attending the convention, but there were only 45,000 hotel rooms in town - and they were all sold out. So Air Bed & Breakfast invited Denverites to list their homes or apartments - or just rooms or couches - to travellers. The response was incredible – within a week they had 800 bookings. Within a year, 100,000. They eventually changed the name to AirBnB - and last year, the site booked over 14 million nights around the world. Travellers can choose from 800,000 listings that include apartments, homes, rooms, couches, private islands, castles and even treehouses - in 34,000 cities in 190 different countries. AirBnB is currently valued at over $10 billion. It is eating into the business of low and mid-priced hotels, and only three hotel corporations have higher market values than AirBnB – Hilton, Starwood and Marriott.

With the sharing economy gaining ground and stealing market share from traditional corporations and brands, the pushback has been fierce.

Uber has been banned in several European cities, and both UberX and Lyft are facing legal fights here at home, with established cab companies filing suits claiming car sharing companies don't adhere to rules and regulations. In December of 2012, the city of Toronto charged Uber with 25 municipal licensing offenses. At Lyft's launch party in Manhattan, taxi companies parked their cars around the venue in protest with signs that said, "Lyft yourself out of New York." A cab company in San Jose California stated that car sharing services have taken 30% of their business. It's no wonder - according to Forbes, 50,000 new drivers join Uber every month around the world. The hotel industry is lobbying government to stop AirBnB in many cities, insisting the website be forced to collect hotel taxes. Smaller economy hotels are feeling the pinch of AirBnB. One such hotel chain in New York said it had continued growth until AirBnB arrived. Others say they are experiencing a 10% drop in business. The collaborative economy shows no signs of slowing down. Some analysts estimate the sharing market will grow from $3.5 billion in 2014, to over $100 billion in just a few years. 

With the march of the sharing economy, it's interesting to see how established brands are reacting. The Home Depot, which is in the business of selling tools, is now renting tools in about half of its 2,000 locations.With over 4.5 million people taking advantage of car sharing options, Mercedes responded with its Cars2Go service, renting SmartCars for 38 cents a minute, including fuel, insurance and parking. Positioning itself as an option for even shorter rides than Zipcar offers. Speaking of ZipCars, Avis decided to stop competing against Zipcars, and bought them. GM invested $3M in RelayRides.com. It seems like a strange investment for a car manufacturer – but GM hopes that people sharing a Chevy might be convinced to buy one, and GM can incentivize sales by actually promoting the idea that a new car now comes with a rental income stream attached. Pepsi sponsored a contest across 10 cities in which winners got the services of a TaskRabbit personal assistant for an hour. It allowed Pepsi to get a toe into the sharing world, and gave TaskRabbit exposure to a much larger audience. And in the ultimate cross-pollination in the sharing economy, AirBnB hosts hire TaskRabbits to deliver apartment keys to renters. It's a full circle moment. Now even the sharing economy is sharing.

Could it be that sharing is the new buying. The fact that North Americans spend $20 billion on storage facilities proves there is definitely an "idling capacity" waiting to be repurposed. While we've been sharing to survive for over 45,000 years, technology has created a universal hub that has never existed before. And a struggling economy has created a mindset. As Forbes stated, the sharing economy may prove to be the longest-lasting legacy of the Great Recession. It begs a big question: What happens when the largest demographic group in history – the Millennials – decides to share instead of buy? It's bad news for brands. But it has an upside: The sharing economy helps make the environment better without sacrificing. Less stuff is manufactured, fewer products are purchased, less waste. History shows us these disruptions always start unassumingly small – then suddenly gather up power and break on the shores of business like a tsunami. Think of music-sharing pioneer Napster. Here and gone. Then before we knew it, the music industry was completely under water. While there are regulatory hurdles and protests, sites like Uber and AirBnb continue to grow – because the ability to scale up is one of the most explosive aspects of the Internet. 20th century laws are going to have to give way to 21st century realities, and big brands that haven't been paying attention are going to have to figure out strategies to co-exist with sharing sites. Either way, a crack has appeared in the foundation of modern marketing. It's no longer a matter of keeping up with the Joneses, it's time to share with them… …when you're under the influence.

Innovation Economy of Platforms

The new world is being developed with new platforms. In the last few centuries, new world was explored in Americas, Austalia and many other parts of the planet. The first requirement for development of these new world was to build the transport infrastructure. Once the shipping routes and railway and road highway infrastructure was created, it automatically followed with millions of entrepreneurs who started trading, manufacturing, service businesses.

Same thing is now happening in the new world connected with internet and powered by exponential technologies. In the last few decades, Information Highways are developed all across the world and that has fuelled growth of Internet or Web entrepreneurs. Those countries which were ahead of the rest in building high band width internet infrastructure have notices maximum development of Internet economy. This followed with robust mobile phone infrastructure, fuelling mobile revolution. This strategy of building the infrastructure platform which will be utilized by millions of entrepreneurs to build their businesses, is being adopted by several Fortune 500 top technology companies, like IBM, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and even our Indian IT services multinationals like TCS, Infosys etc.

Apple and Google built the platforms for their iOS and Adroid users.

Within just 5 years, 1.25 million entrepreneurs have developed apps for Apple iOS platform and 85 billion users have downloaded these apps. A entirely new economy of Apps market was created.

Take for an example, how IBM is developing a platform with Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities. So many entrepreneurs are exploring the opportunities of building products and services which will use AI. Now they need not worry about building underlying AI infrastructure. A doctor who would like to build a specialized diagnostics service in his niche area of specialization can build his service on IBM Watson platform which readily provides access to whole worlds knowledge of medicine and AI capabilities for diagnostics. Once this doctor has developed his services in his specialized area of expertise on IBM Watson platform, the Doctor's business and IBM's Watson platform will grow together. IBM is therefore providing all facilities for new entrepreneurs to build their businesses on their platform.

Same holds true with SAP, which is promoting the SAP Hana platform, Amazon which is promoting AWS platform and Google's Appengine and Microsoft's Azure etc. etc. Our Engineering colleges should take advantage of this opportunity and try to get as many platforms on the campus for students to build their start ups. Generally all these platform companies will offer free acess to students and also several other mentoring and training opportunities.

Software Tools for Entrepreneurs

Start Up Management Versus Business Management

Start Up Management is completely different than Business Management, the way it is being taught in all Management Schools. The Lean Start up movement started by Steve Blank, Eric Ries, Ash Mourya and so many other proponents are telling this for the past several years. Business Management is all about how to optimize an existing, running business with established business models to maximise profits. Start Up management on the other hand is about experimenting a new business model, testing out the hypothesis and finally finding out which business model works. A business manager can not afford to fail, the start up manger is expected will fail fast and several times. Given this fundamental difference, the business management systems that have evolved over last few decades like ERP and Supply Chain Management, etc. are not of much use for the start ups. Instead an entirely new set of start up management tools are getting popular. Following is a list of software tools designed specifically for start ups of the modern times.

Start Up Management Software Tools

Lean Start Up tools

Lean Start Up methodology is now the defacto standard followed by all new start ups, specially the IT/web oriented start ups. Each Guru of this new methodology has helped create a software tool to manage the entire end  to end process from Ideation to Scale-up.

Launch Pad Central (https://www.launchpadcentral.com/) being called "Platform for Evidence-based Entrepreneurship" is promoted by Lean Start Up methodology founder, Steve Blank. Every student of Steve Blank at Stanford and UC Berkley, gets to use this tool.

Lean Stack (http://leanstack.com/)  helps a start up build Business Model, set up experiments, measure and get analytics. Developed by Ash Mourya.
Strategyzer (https://strategyzer.com/) is companion tool to the books "Business Model Generation" and "Value Propositin Design" by Alex Osterwalder.

Project Management

Each Start Up is a project and an Accelerator organization is required to manage many of them together, often as a cohort. Each start up has to keep track of planned activities, resources, milestones, assign tasks to team members, reporting progress etc. and consolidated reporting across all start ups for program management at Accelerator level. Several project management tools are being marketed specially for the Start ups, here is a list of some

ASANA (https://asana.com/product), PROOFHUB (http://www.proofhub.com/), BASECAMP (https://basecamp.com/), PODIO (https://podio.com/site),  SMARTSHEET (http://www.smartsheet.com/)

But a generic project management suite like Microsoft EPM which includes common MSProject also does a good job with specially tailors templates for a start up accelerator. 

Mentoring Management

For Start up accelerators, facilitating the mentor/mentee relations is a very important activity. Starting from recruitment of mentors and mentees, matching, monitoring progress and reporting. Several tools have come in the market to meet this requirement. There are software tools, a cloud platforms with hosted solution or a complete online mentoring program with mentors already recruited and ready to start immediately. Here are 2 solutions that I have used but there are so many others available in the market. Launchspot.io (http://launchspot.io/) is developed in the Waterloo start up world. Mentorcloud (http://www.mentorcloud.com/#about) is another solution developed in California. 

Funding Management

This is a special requirement of Start up accelerators. The sources of capital available to start ups has exploded over the past decade. There is free money in the form of grants from Government as well as charities, Angel investors are giving money with charitable as well as commercial interests, sharks are looking around for big catch. Investors are interested at different growth stages - early start up, scaling up, matured. In spite of so many investors, still it is not easy to match the right start up with the investors. 

Funding Portal (http://thefundingportal.com/) is a good example which is useful to finding government money in Canada. 

GUST (https://gust.com/) connects Start ups with investors around the world. 

KICKSTARTER (https://www.kickstarter.com/) and INDIEGOGO (https://www.indiegogo.com/) help you crowdfund your project. 

CDLIND (http://www.cdling.com/desktop/) scores your project, connects up with investors and experts resulting into powerful funding marketplace.

FUNDVANTAGE (https://www.fundvantage.ca/overview) provides current intelligence on various government funding programs, which helps start ups to choose the best options to persue and hence subsantially improve the funding success rate.

Learning Management System (LMS)

The main task the accelerators have is to educate. The promoters general come with excellent technical knowledge, perhaps also some commercial or legal knowledge but they invariably have a need for several very specialized topics.  Generally a start up acceleration cohort will follow regular week by week classroom and out of the building structured learning which benefits with a Learning Management System. Several excellent online courses are available which can be leveraged by the Accelerator program. An LMS like Moodle (https://moodle.org/) or a MOOC (Masive Open Online Course) management system like OpenedX (http://code.edx.org/) is a backbone of all learning in an Accelerator program.

Growth Marketing Tools

Start up is all about growth. The growth requires promoting/selling in all aspects of strat up. The product sales of course in most important but start up also needs intensive selling for recruiting top talent, vendors, promoting with government and other support organizations, investors ...

So much marketing and sales effort but all that has to be managed on shoe string budget. With good luck, the new start ups have learned to use social media very effectively. Every start up can not have these growth marketing social media expertise. However, the Accelerator organizations can provide various social media marketing tools and support to help their start up clients successfully achieve their growth targets. 

Need for an Integrated Platform

In the pat few years, start up practice has evolved very fast and so many tools have become available. These tools, however, have evolved in isolation. When a user organization adopts these tools there are integration challenges. Achieving this integration at each user organization is expensive exercise. It will therefore benefit if an integrated cloud-based platform is developed where all these tools are integrated and ready to use. Common standards for data exchange will need to evolve and some modifications may be necessary by each tool vendor to conform to standards. Fortunately, however, such integration is now very practical.

Creative Thinking for Ideas

Entrepreneurship starts with great ideas. The more the brains more ideas will come up. Therefore, crowd sourcing is the best methd to generate ideas. But having generated a large number of ideas, systematic evaluation and selection is an intensive process. Several tools and platforms are now available to entrepreneurs. Following is a list of few such resources for entrepreneurs.

IdeaScale is a platform to crowdsource ideas from customers, employees or any other community. Te platform provides complete idea life cycle functinality to capture ideas, share, nurture, evaluate, select etc.
eYeka, is a platform to create competitions for creative writing, Animation, Illustration, Photography, Label and Package design, Script Writing, Graphic Design, Video etc. The website provides the introduction "As the leading crowdsourcing platform, we help our creative community to improve on its creative skills, work with the biggest global brands and their agencies, and get rewarded for creating high quality content and ideas."

Spigit: SpigitEngage is the only platform that provides the capabilities to Innovate at Scale. Surface the best ideas that your employees, partners, and customers have to offer, and quickly turn them into results. Drive the crowd participation and engagement that sustains enterprise-grade innovation programs. More than collaborative. More than Social. More than ideas. SpigitEngage is innovation made intelligent.

InnoCentive: "We crowdsource innovation solutions from the world’s smartest people, who compete to provide ideas and solutions to important business, social, policy, scientific, and technical challenges."
SolutionXchange SolutionXchange is a platform where industry experts help generate solutions to business challenges posted by Genpact employees and clients. Created in the spirit of "Open Innovation", this platform benefits all participants. Genpact and its clients post business challenges on the SolutionXchange website and offer registered experts significant financial rewards for submitting the most innovative solution. The solutions submitted by experts are evaluated by Genpact internal experts and in some cases by client representatives who have posted the challenge. Solutions are kept completely confidential and the IP transfer process is managed by Genpact , 
Crowdtap, the Leading Social Influence Marketing Platform (SaaS), makes it easy for marketers to influence the conversation around their brand by inspiring a crowd of consumers to create quality content, drive unmatched social activity and provide real-time insights.
Brightidea Brightidea's product offerings include WebStorm, Switchboard, and Pipeline – a complete product suite that covers the entire idea lifecycle from initial collection through execution..