Large enterprises are beginning to show keen interest in innovation, with many already started to embark on their innovation journey.
The quests for improvements and to develop new products and services are not new. Large enterprises have always been investing in engaging internal employees to develop new ideas and to solve internal or their customers’ problems. However, recently the form and process of innovation is changing. Large corporations have begun to notice news of young startups disrupting the marketplace. Corporate managers have started to be aware that the startups could be a new group of partners that they could tap on to co-innovate. As such the idea of innovation is starting to transform from internal innovation to collaborative innovation.
Being in the heart of the startup ecosystem in Singapore, and working with partners across the region, I have observed that over the last couple of months, there has been an accelerated interest from large corporations to engage startups.
I also have the privilege to work with a number of them who are interested to find out how they could reach out and engage the startups. To startup ecosystem builders like myself, this is definitely a wonderful news as engagement with MNCs would potentially create good growth paths and market access opportunities for the startups. Unfortunately, not many enterprises that I spoke with know how to engage the startups, and some may have the wrong understanding of what co-innovation means.
Innovation is not an event but a journey. To rally the whole company to believe in and adopt an innovative culture would take much more than just a few workshops. Collaborative innovation with external parties like the startups would even be more challenging. To simply think that by organising a hackathon would drive huge transformation is going to set the stage for huge disappointment, and this could even be counterproductive to the innovation effort.
Based on my many discussions and engagements with organisations that are embarking on innovation journey and exploring ways which they could co-innovate with the startups, I have developed a Corporate-Startups Co-innovation Maturity Level model. This model is not meant to be comprehensive and is work-in-progress, but it can serve as a quick guide for the interested organisations to gauge the level they are at.
In essence, the IDEAS model depicts 5 levels/stages of corporate-startups co-innovation which an organisation would go through, and the types of internal and external activities best recommended for the organisation to embark on.
The 5 stages/levels in the IDEAS model are
- Initial Stage
- Discovery Stage
- Engaging Stage
- Accelerating Stage, and
- Sustaining Growth Stage
Refer to the attached diagram for the IDEAS model. I will further elaborate on each of the stages in my future posts.
by Edmas Neo
Adoption, adaptation, modification, implementation and use of the IDEAS model requires the consent of the author.
