Luisa Rouillard was an entrepreneur long before she studied at business school and learned how to run a company. She started her first venture, a recruitment and temporary staffing agency, aged 20, while she was studying at the University of Johannesburg.
As she approached her 30th birthday, and having graduated from the MBA programme at ESMT Berlin, Ms Rouillard decided against returning to life as an entrepreneur. Instead, she joined Startupbootcamp Berlin, a branch of a global chain of industry-specific accelerators offering management training and office space to company founders.
The terms incubator and accelerator are often used interchangeably. While both organisations are popular bases for early-stage ventures, incubators are generally focused on helping companies at the very beginning — often at the ideas stage — while accelerators often work with founders in a later phase of development.