Working with startups has become chic in the boardrooms of big companies. But it’s also an open secret that it does not always bring much. No matter how inexperienced some startups enter an established market, it is sometimes a big deal trying to co-operate with the “young savages”. Both worlds follow their own written and unwritten laws.
Myth Corporate Incubator
The Austrian IT company Frequentis has been operating its own incubator in Vienna for almost 20 years. There, startups are helped to build their business. “It was still revolutionary in the 1990s,” says Joachim Edel, who has been working at Frequentis since the beginning of the year and is responsible for innovation and business development in the board office.
Corporate Incubator is the name of the concept and is practiced by many corporations. However, the pioneers are beginning to feel disillusioned: “The startup center has produced over 80 successful startups, but many of them have only marginally to do with Frequentis’ core business.”
The fact that the business incubator is currently a construction site and will be renovated by 2020 also has symbolic value: the startup commitment should become more fruitful for Frequentis. For this, the IT company has got a professional with Edel. The aerospace engineer helped build the ZAL “the largest open-innovation center for civil aviation worldwide” in Hamburg until the end of 2018, he says. Startups, corporations and research institutes work together there – Edel knows what’s important.
Few, close startup partnerships
Frequentis has close cooperation with startups. According to Edel, it’s about supplementing products with the components of start-up companies. Technology partnerships are created, and new markets are conquered together. However, the provider of information and communication systems maintains such relationships only to a handful of selected, international startups.
At the “B2B Software Days” in Vienna, Austria Wirtschaftsservice organized a matchmaking workshop called Industry-Startup.Net, which should make it easier for companies and start-ups to find each other. Eight industrial companies have presented what they are looking for on stage, and around 30 startups have joined them on “speeding” tables. Frequentis is looking for innovations for police or fire department control centers. This Friday, four startups have come forward with ideas and one of them wants to invite Edel now for further discussions. The startup has a Speech Recognition AI that can hear details of the emergency conversation and automatically translate it into a form.
Prepare the organization for startups
“Businesses often do something with startups just for the sake of the term. That should not really be, “says the expert. “For some ideas, it may be better to work with research institutes or other experienced companies. For which question which type of innovation partner are most suitable, a company must also know depending on its structure”.
In addition, one must also prepare an organization well for cooperation with young companies. “Imagine that an innovative component of a startup was not yet mature and connected to our safety-critical systems. They call 112 in an emergency situation and are misdirected in our networks. ” In order to understand in which areas of the own company a cooperation makes sense, one must go out of the board offices and talk to the individual operational departments.