I have watched a number of programs arrive here, designed elsewhere, with competent teams and serious budgets. Most of them work, at least in part. Those that run into difficulty almost always run into it at the same point, and that point sits upstream of what they had planned to address.
The first gap concerns the pool of candidates. A program calibrated for a market where applicants arrive with a registered company, a team and early revenue will find candidates at an earlier stage here. This says nothing about their quality. It says that the entry criteria were written for a different population, and that they will either screen out interesting profiles or be loosened under pressure, which amounts to designing the selection after the fact.
The second gap concerns the organisations the program will have to work with. An incubator, an accelerator and a coworking space cover very different realities here, with levels of maturity that cannot be read from the outside. An organisation that selects its partners on the basis of a presentation or a label sometimes finds itself having to support its own partners before it can support anyone else.
What a relay provides
What an arriving organisation cannot acquire quickly is knowledge of what already exists. Which organisations actually function, which carry a name without carrying activity, which programs have already been attempted on the same subject and why they stopped, which institutions fund what and on which timeline. That knowledge is not in the reports, because reports describe what was planned.
Nor can it be replaced by a local hire, at least not immediately. Someone recruited knows their own network, which is already a great deal, but does not necessarily know the history of the programs that came before them.
I describe this without reproach. An organisation expanding into a new region makes a reasonable bet in assuming that its method transposes. It often does. What does not transpose are the implicit assumptions about the candidate pool, about partner organisations and about timelines. Those assumptions are better examined before the terms of reference are written than in the middle of the first cohort.