Growth Catalyst
Possibilities for innovations when corporations and startups merge approaches
The big corporations - known for taking over any market on the horizon and being semi-flexible to change, new ways of working and innovation. Yet those days, we’d say, are long gone. Corporations now have ever more, started working with startups. Why? Let’s see what the involvement of both have in store for each other and why ever more corporations rely on startups to bring in a fresh breeze with a major source of innovation, ideations and motivation.
Startups employ emerging technologies to invent products as well as reinvent business models, and corporations who strive to increase and embrace a source of external strategies look to startups to find that. Where the large corporation have their fixed working hours, with their visions, missions and short and long-term goals, startups are known to “go with the flow” and to change rapidly according to their surroundings, with a huge amount of uncertainty.
A recent study by the Unilever Foundation states that the desire is stronger than ever for corporations to improve their innovation by working closely with startups. Based on the results of a survey of 204 corporate brand managers and 114 startups, 80 percent of corporates believe that startups can have a positive impact on a large company’s approach in innovation, almost 90 percent of startups believe that they are able to deliver business solutions that can be scaled and 46 percent of those startups who have never worked with corporates before are most likely to do so in the future.
The report estimated that an ultimate partnership will be formed with corporates and startups working side by side within the same physical space at the latest by 2025 when seeking greater proximity for innovation as they evolve to meet changing consumer needs.
That is where corporate accelerators seem to pop up. They exist to offer an approach to grow and feed interesting innovations from entrepreneurial ventures. Yet the large differences between the two types of businesses make the collaboration an ongoing challenge. Corporate accelerators need to be carefully designed to add enough value to startups for them to see it as a benefit for the growth of their company, whereas the corporate managers need to thoughtfully consider the design dimension of proposition, process, people and place in order for this accelerator to be a part of the corporate’s overall innovation strategy.
In fact, 8 out of 10 brand managers who have worked with startups previously expect to work more frequently with them in the future.