Innovating beyond start-up tourism

Start-ups are out-pacing corporates in several areas of innovation, leading many of them to form partnerships for co-innovation via accelerators and hackathons. Start-up creativity and agility seem to be a good complementary match for corporate scale and standardisation.

Here are the takeaways for successful innovation partnerships.

Map trends, disruptions
A good starting point for innovation journeys would be to map the broad trends and competitive transformations in the industry. Knowledge management techniques like internal and external knowledge mapping are useful here. Such knowledge mapping helps identify internal strengths, competitive positioning, and opportunities for filling knowledge gaps via partnerships with start-ups and academia.

Innovation matters
The methods of innovation themselves are being innovated, and a wide range of books, conferences, and workshops address emerging frameworks of innovation such as frugal innovation, disruptive innovation, crowdsourced innovation, reverse innovation, co-innovation and open innovation.

Co-innovation with start-ups is a fruitful option for growth, but needs changes in corporate leadership strategy, culture and processes. People-centric approaches are needed, coupled with data-centric assessment.

The India opportunity
India has 1,100 MNC R&D centres, over 5,000 tech start-ups, and a pool of 300,000 STEM graduates each year, said Preeti Anand, director, Zinnov. MNCs have clearly recognised India’s innovation potential through accelerators and Global In-House Centres. However, India accounts for less than 1% of global patent filings each year, Preeti observed. India needs to focus on breakthrough innovation as well as sustained continuous innovation, she advised.

Partnership scope
Many corporates begin their start-up partnership with “start-up tourism” and a “start-up zoo,” joked Avnish Sabharwal, MD, Accenture. But just visiting a range of start-ups, hosting a meetup, or inviting some start-ups to work out of the corporate office is not sufficient. To go beyond the awareness stage, corporates need to develop maturity frameworks for further stages like ideation, exploration, partnership, collaboration, co-creation, impact, and optimisation. This should in turn be mapped onto the start-up phases of growth.

There are different options available for corporates to partner with start-ups at various stages in their innovation journey: idea stage (hackathons, business plan competitions), launch stage (co-working spaces, incubators, mentorship networks, corporate funding) and growth stage (accelerators, go-to-market).

Innovation sources
Profiles of innovation team members include strategists, product experts, process specialists, technologists, IP experts, and innovation advocates. Innovation should be broad-based so that inputs can come from any employee and even via open innovation: from customers, consultants, competitors, trade associations, academia, business partners, and start-ups. 

Source: YourStory.com