Two Accelerator Programs for Blockchain Enterprises by IBM and Columbia University

According to an IBM news release on Nov. 19, two blockchain accelerator programs have been announced by IBM and Columbia University that aim to help startups in the space innovate at scale.

A joint innovation center that was established for blockchain and data transparency by the tech giant IBM and U.S. ivy league school Columbia University.

With the release of these programs, each blockchain program will support ten startups, thereby offering them a network of business mentors, access to Columbia’s student talent, technical support and “research community” , ” design assistance” and IBM cloud technology resources.

The idea of these programs is to help network creators translate ideas into “sustainable and scalable” blockchain enterprises. Once this will come in picture ” meaningful enterprise blockchain adoption and drive business efficiencies across industries” will be encouraged tremendously.

The release of the eight-week Columbia blockchain launch accelerator, set to take place in New York City, has been designed for pre – speed ” idea stage” companies that are affiliated with various NYC- based schools like Columbia University.

The IBM blockchain accelerator, on the other hand, is targeted at later-stage companies globally in its eight- week program. The program aim to help participants in establishing client base for their blockchain applications, in order to set up a business network. To give participants more free time to devote to their business scaling efforts, the program will partially run-in person in New York and San Francisco and partly ” in combination with virtual programming.”

The participants are allowed to take part free of charge. Neither programs take equity or charges a fee for participation. Each participant startup on both programs will reportedly be supplied with around $400,000 worth of access of technology and services.

Many top-ranked universities globally already offer a host of blockchain and crypto-related courses. However , if a fellow New-York based school New York University (NYC) has to be believed, they are the “first” U.S. school to offer a major in blockchain technology, to be provided by the NYU Stern School of Business.

IBM is ranked second worldwide in terms of number of blockchain- related patents, as of Aug. 31, 2018, second only to China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba. Its only due to IBM’s own Hyperledger powered cloud blockchain platform that they are able to make major inroads into the enterprise blockchain space.