Our History
Entrepreneurial Spark's story began in 2012 with a unique vision: To build great people who build great businesses.
Since its inception, our focus has been on empowering entrepreneurs with the tools they need to succeed. We provide programmes that cultivate entrepreneurial mindsets and behaviours to facilitate impactful acceleration and growth for founders.
From 2012 to 2018, we teamed up with NatWest Group to create the world's largest free accelerator. With hubs spread across the UK, our dedicated team of enablers empowered nearly 4,000 entrepreneurs to reach their full potential. In 2018, we transferred the programme over to NatWest and are delighted by the enduring impact it continues to make today.
Growth and Evolution:
Altogether, we have established 27 accelerators across four continents, facilitated over 90 cohorts, and supported more than 5,000 entrepreneurs in their journey to accelerate and succeed.
Building on our success in driving growth, we launched a global initiative to expand our people accelerators worldwide. Collaborating with organisations in Bermuda, Scandinavia, Central America, and Sub-Saharan Africa, we have been fostering mindset shifts that drive innovation within entrepreneurial communities across the globe.
Today, our team continues to deliver high-impact programmes in sectors such as Space and Defense together with our partners, and for our Evolve Accelerator by Entrepreneurial Spark.
Drawing from our extensive experience in delivering impactful accelerators, we recognised the industry's need for a new type of accelerator and set out to create an innovative online, on-demand, sector agnostic accelerator - more inclusive than ever before - for entrepreneurs aiming to build growth businesses.
Looking towards the future, we eagerly anticipate the limitless potential of entrepreneurs and remain committed to our original goal of prioritising the people behind the business. We will continue to embrace the constantly evolving business landscape to design and deliver accelerator programmes that have a real and lasting impact alongside our exceptional partners.
The experience of working with them was fantastic – they were way faster and more agile than other training providers, constantly listening to us, adapting and experimenting. I suppose I should have expected that from an entrepreneurial partnership! The pace was balanced by pragmatism and a focus on impact. The team went to great lengths to collect insight into what was working and how we could embed new practice. Our business now has a cohort of entrepreneurial leaders that are more enabled to make decisions and push their business forward. They are more self-aware, hungry for feedback and are using a more innovative and entrepreneurial approach in their work.
Fernando Bonaduce
Investing in our people is critical to the success of our business and working directly with entrepreneurs has inspired us to think differently, not only in what we do, but in how we approach opportunities and challenges. Using a customer-led approach, working in partnership with Entrepreneurial – Spark, over the last three years we have co-created a unique entrepreneurial development academy to adopt and role model the traits of successful entrepreneurs and apply these in a large organisation to be more change-ready, innovative and inspire our people to believe in more.
Gordon Merrylees