The World’s Oldest Corporate Incubator

LettsGroup, the family-run branded venture group, has become the first to crack the code to repeat innovation, following the release of the 3rd edition of the company’s methodological framework, Innov@te™. The tried-and-tested approach is a pivotal breakthrough in the world of innovation, allowing a model that codifies and ensures consistent venture production.

In 1796, John Letts built the world’s first corporate incubator. John Letts’s incubator developed a series of successful innovations including the first commercial diary, the Letts Diary. Further innovations included interest tables, specialist clerical and medical diaries, calendars, parliamentary registers, ledgers, and logbooks.

Now, in 2023, LettsGroupmarks the 3rd iteration of Letts Family incubators, with its Executive Chair, Philip Letts, the 7th generation of the eponymous diary family. The world’s oldest corporate incubator has cashed out their invention of the diary, and cashed in on providing sustainable, repetitive innovation and venture building.

A series of corporate and innovative expertise has led to the establishment of LettsGroup. From LettsGroup’s tried and tested methodological approach, innovation can be a codified, patterned stream of service. Heavyweight international technology leaders have unified to support the growth of the branded venture group, including previous senior leaders of O2, Oracle UK and Ireland, EDS International, UBS, Broadview International, and Silverpeak. The team is littered with expertise in the cutting-edge world of innovation and tech.

LettsGroup is breaking through the market with a number of initial ventures, with the aim to establish a ‘Unicorn’ venture by 2030 – with the help of renowned tech investors. To highlight, these ventures include LettsArt, the first NFT-enabled, fully accessible, Web3 platform for the art world; and LettsSafari, the subscription based digital greentech platform that tackles the biodiversity crisis by expanding rewilding initiatives.

The methodology at the core of LettsGroup is Innov@te™. Innov@te™  is the modern and extended approach of John Letts’ original incubator. And LettsGroup is in the business of repeated, technologically advanced, and sustainably conscious innovation. The methodological approach behind LettsGroup is the code to unfolding new ideas to become projects, products, and ventures. Ford cracked the code for mass production. LettsGroup is cracking the code for innovation. More precisely, cracking a new innovation and venture every two and a half years.

But LettsGroup is not in the business of just throwing money and huge sums at problems or innovation. Its Size Zero methodology, accompanying Innov@te™, presses Letts’ theory that getting ‘too big’ kills innovation.

Both philosophies set out a necessary foundational structure to the successful operations of an ‘organisation’ for innovation, LettsGroup.

Where the family ventures, their simple philosophy follows, placing the customer at the heart of innovation. LettsGroup extends and optimises this philosophy, ensuring the customer is centred much earlier than in typical innovation processes, where many assume the centre to lie solely with entrepreneurs and inventors. This process is upheld through tight-loop systems of curation, for which customer data collection and behavioural analysis is at the foundation.

Even more central to the corporate incubator is its seasoned founder, Philip Letts. The Chairman has over thirty years of experience in innovation, launching his first private incubator, Prophete, in 1997. From Prophete came Beenz – the earliest iteration of a crypto currency, boasting more than 6 million customers before its sale to Carlson Group companies.

Prophete was the first test of the Innov@te™ methodology. From Philip Letts’ second private incubator in 2006, The Visual Studio, came Maistro Ltd. Once again, the innovation was a breakthrough in the creative services marketplace, taken public in 2012. From The Visual Studio came Size Zero, a methodology handbook published in 2015 to guide young ventures to scale with greater efficiency and control.

The company boasts the corporate values of innovation, sustainability, quality, integrity, and family. Led by the Letts family and managed by established industry leaders, LettsGroup is combining innovation with tackling the issues of society today, placing environmental consciousness at the forefront of these values. Its integrity is derived in its stance that no innovation supported by the incubator will be without deep considerations of sustainability, a pledge the Group has and will continue to uphold.