Due to the era of startups disrupting traditional big guns, several of these established enterprises are getting jittery. While they want to enhance their level of business innovation, they do not have the patience or ability to do something on their own. So they are outsourcing innovation in the form of Joint Ventures, M&As or even setting up incubators and accelerators rather than scaling up organically. Time and again it has been proven that such activities can only be seen as ad-ons, not as the main channel of innovation. The trend of larger companies supporting or establishing incubators or accelerator programmes has some benefits but cannot be seen as a substitute to organic creative growth. These incubators are seen as ready-made source of talent and creativity. The idea is that with some level of management training imparted, these accelerators can come up with cutting-edge innovations without the direct involvement of the company. These companies are aware of the extremely low success rates in innovations and thus do not want to directly invest time or effort in to it. This is a wrong mindset as innovation must be seen as an investment and not expense.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/brianquinn/2016/09/22/you-cant-outsource-innovation/#6d79cdc47aba