how to impact your business with startups

Every week, we read a new announcement about a corporate opening its own startup’s lab: ready to accept a small number of startups which provide a disruptive value offer in their business. The richest ones are partnering with @Techstars, but all accelerators are ready today to support your open innovation initiative and charge services to introduce you to this new ecosystem, drop your new projects in their cocoon or execute your idea on demand in their startup studio. This beautiful story will end itself as soon as a corporate will launch a RFP to find the best “accelerator” partner for its own innovation lab.

Predictions are only valuable for your ability to change. As corporate, if you want to create an impact in your business with startups, you will need:

• to change your corporate culture;
• to provide to startups a platform for growth;
• to manage your open innovation lab as a service center open to all corporates;

Accelerators are struggling

The accelerator’s business is changing fast with a risk to be disrupted soon like corporate. They have duplicated a Silicon Valley model that relies on corporate partners who are ready to pay membership to get information about what is happening in their business in this ecosystem. This “show room” model doesn’t work outside San Francisco. Some accelerators are transforming themselves in early stage venture fund and others are looking to provide to corporate an updated version of IT services companies dedicated to innovation.

New leaders provide platform & corporate VC

Before deciding to pay for services from an accelerator, you should look for inspiration from the new open innovation leaders: #Slack (B2B), #Amazon Alexa (Voice) and #Xaomi (IOT). They are providing a platform to deliver a fast access to a large community of users and a corporate VC fund to bootstrap a large number of startups.

A new set of rules for innovation

Why a corporate has to provide platform & corporate VC to transform startup’s leads?

• #1: you don’t need anymore to work like a startup. There so many startups in the market, looking for new business models, with efficient organization and process like lean startup that you don’t need to play this game. Let them do the customer discovery job, and accelerate those who provide results.

• #2: you need to work with a lot of startups. You have to reduce all integration and collaboration frictions with your teams. Go fast with each one, save your time for others. “Select only the best” just means that you will be always too late or too slow in your business.
• #3: you need to change you culture, kill opinions and raise evidences. You can’t do that with the most honored profiles from your teams and in house. You have to trust new profiles and let them go outside your office. Small team, small budget and reward failures are the new rules. They don’t have to provide regular progress milestones but they have to start with the core issues and fix first what hasn’t been fixed before.

A new place for open innovation culture: the “mix-corporate openlab”

If you wait for innovation from your teams, you can’t provide a culture change without extracting them from your perfectly designed for execution culture! And if you want them to deliver faster results with startups, you need also to share their office with other corporates and startups at the beginning of their project. This new office dedicated to open innovation success, is a “mix-corporate openlab”. The new pillars for your “mix-corporate openlab” are:

• provide unlimited access to training: “all you can eat” & “ask for help”;
• change the culture: engage team to deliver first what will provide the biggest results, fix the unfixable; reward failure;
• open this place to other corporates, customers or partners, and startups, select them carefully without collaboration opportunity prerequisite;
• engage all your corporate teams to deliver fast: as longer their stay, more expensive is their office renting costs.

Focus your innovation & iterations to deliver platform

Be selective. Select the right profile of innovations you can accelerate in the “mix-corporate openlab”: only platform potential project for corporate teams. Startups are their first customers to iterate and deliver the right value offer together for the final user. A platform is defined with three main assets:

• a community of users or customers ;
• a large number of third parties value offer providers;
• a set of features that can’t be provided by other partners;

Looking back at our history, we had the Minitel, the i-mode, the app store platforms providing fast growth and success to startups. Now, we have new platforms raising everywhere: Slack (B2B); Messenger/Whatsapp (B2B2C)… Corporates don’t need to copy or compete with startups. They need to focus their innovation and iterations to deliver platforms that will help startups to accelerate their customer discovery process. Startups are much more adapted than corporates to achieve this or to die. The platform’s ability to collaborate fast with a large number of startups is key for its success and strength the impact of open innovation in your business.

Business developers are your key asset

The success of a “mix-corporate openlab” relies on its business development team dedicated to:

• Convince people: business development team is in charge to recruit new corporate’s project teams with platform goals. In parallel, this business development team have to recruit also startups that may collaborate now or later with the corporate’s projects platform. Select them carefully, but don’t ask for partnership op
• Engage people: putting people together in the same office (corporate’s teams & startups) will only help them to better respect each other. If you want them to achieve results, you need to provide them a strong business developer team, people with an entrepreneurial spirit, ready to go outside the building and learn from their potential customers. It’s only the customer validation that will make the partnership between your platform and startups a reality. Next, startups need an efficient access to venture capital, like your own Corporate VC team, but not only. Your business developer team will have to be connected to all VC & corporate VC.
• portunity as a prerequisite to selection.

As an example: building an healthcare platform

@Robocath is robotizing vascular catheterization and looking for a serie A venture investment. As Corporate VC interested in healthcare, it may be a good investment opportunity: their technology is more efficient than their US competitor and surgeons need it if they don’t want to die from a professional cause cancer. As a telco, construction or hotel company, you may notice that if the army is able to remote control a drone all over the world, the future hospital can be separated in several territorial services centers for patients and centralized control rooms with doctors. If this comes true, the biggest opportunity to test and learn this new organization in a hospital is @Robocath because they provide a business model for remote vascular catheterization operations. But your money isn’t enough to create an impact in your business: you need to recruit a team in your company that will deliver a platform to @Robocath to manage the remote operations (network, office, employment agency…) and next recruit other startups that will create new services for this platform. This team will have to build a new value offer for the hospital using @Robocath as a go to market enabler. The best way to achieve fast results is to put them together in the same building outside your corporate culture: provide them unlimited access to training and business development support, with extreme short time delivery requirement: 6 months rather 2 years. That’s the efficient way to be the next healthcare platform.

R.O.I

Moving outside your office your project team in charge of delivering new platforms for startups may be too much expensive? Where is your return of investment? The deal is to kill your project in 6 months by immersion in a new culture, rather than 18 months if they stay in your office. ROI is easy to forecast: you spare 10 employee’s salaries during a year.

Conclusion: take the best from GoogleX & Rocketspace

Open innovation greatest value for a corporate is the ability to keep its decision capacity in a world where every 18 months, a new technical wave is changing the context of your previous decision: if you are not able to execute your decisions fast, you are losing time and money. The great interest of our new entrepreneurial era is that you don’t need to execute yourself your idea, you should better invest in the delivery of platforms for those who are executing your vision. The best inspiration available from existing models is to merge the #GoogleX experience with the @Rocketspace environment.

Another way to share this vision with pictures:

Source : https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/corporate-right-time-stop-your-open-innovation-herve-naudin/