Call-for-Partners: Innovation for All, the corporate-startup collaboration initiative

Fostering corporate-startup collaboration has been one of the common goals for partner programs in Taiwan Tech Arena (TTA), whether the programs are led by corporation, accelerator or other international startup supporting organizations. The programs come in many formats: corporate accelerator, customized startup network engagement program, corporate open innovation program, corporate venture, etc. Regardless of the names, essentially, corporate participants want to seek innovation and growth engines outside of internal organizations; and startups want to get access to customer pipelines and get feedback from users. While there are good intentions from both ends, there is also huge transaction cost on corporate side as well on startup end:

“A transaction cost is any cost involved in making an economic transaction. For example, when buying a good or buying foreign exchange, there will be some transaction costs (in addition to the price of the good. The cost could be financial, extra time or inconvenience.)” By Economics Help

In specific, extra time and inconvenience, is probably the biggest pain point for corporate to build smooth collaboration with startups. For example, there are hundreds of thousands startups in Crunchbase or any other startup database platform. There are also dozens of corporate innovation programs out there in platform like F6S. It’s always not easy to navigate through the information; and even people get through it and put together a list, it also takes a lot of time to set up initial meetings and get the business opportunity into reality for both corporate and startup ends. Let alone that within the corporate, there are always a lot of internal communication cost associated with new projects.

To me part of the value created by programs or services aiming at driving corporate-startup collaboration, let it be startup database platforms, corporate innovation consultants, corporate accelerators, or programs like Taiwan Tech Arena, seems to be reducing the transaction cost along the process, and thus the perfect world would look like this:

1. The corporate-startup collaboration program should be able to help corporate get core innovation team trained and built up through the program effectively (so as to shape the long term corporate internal innovation culture and be open to work with innovation internally and externally)
2. The corporate-startup collaboration program would act like a self-starting community that people working on corporate innovation projects would love to help each other and be inclusive as possible (so that best knowledge can be shared around)
3. The corporate-startup collaboration program would be able to effectively provide the comprehensive yet accurate corporate-startup matching making suggestion (so that both ends can find partners effectively)

By looking at current “program providers”, hardly anyone of them could offer the full coverage here:

• Database platforms do not do curated match-making and community building
• Accelerators either have their own focus on their own portfolio or only focus on needs from certain corporate
• Consulting firm may help train corporate innovation firms but they don’t have the width and depth of startup network to run programs
• Program like TTA have many priorities needs to hit

So getting into the third year of Taiwan Tech Arena program, I’d like to throw an idea out and seek support and co-organizing partners to help the ecosystem here move a little bit to the perfect world of corporate-startup collaboration programs.

Photo by Nikita Kachanovsky on Unsplash

Innovation for All: a prototype of corporate-startup collaboration program

The mock up site here is the prototype of the idea. This would be structured as a 6-month series events breaking into:

• First 2 months: 10 corporate innovation master class: with objective to get corporate innovation team well-trained and come out with concrete idea/subjects to work with startups; also serve as platform to drive corporate executive awareness and participation
• Following 3 months startup recruitment and hand-in-hand match-making and startup support
• Concluded with typical onsite (or online, based on pandemic situation by end of the year) conference and Demo

Multiple startup supporting organizations would need to be included here. Accelerators would need to host certain vertical of the corporate and startups; consultants or corporate education program providers could lead some of the “master class”, and corporate or industry association would need to help lead corporate recruitment effort so as to drive corporate engagement. Program like TTA would likely play coordinator role here, as well as ensuring resource could be leveraged with each other and satisfaction of stakeholders.

Longer term play: dedicated organization

The prototype and campaign here should be a stepping stone to make this into a long-lasting organization that could learn muscle memory from the experiences, accumulate awareness from both corporate and startup side, win support from accelerators or other partners and build business model accordingly, and potentially win corporate long term support. Most importantly, it could serve as dedicated organization here. TTA may play the role if a dedicated team within TTA can be identified and authorized. Nevertheless, here I’m reflecting what Brad Feld listed down in “The Boulder Thesis” for startup community building:

• Entrepreneurs must lead the startup community.
• The leaders must have a long-term commitment.
• The startup community must be inclusive of anyone who wants to participate in it.
• The startup community must have continual activities that engage the entire entrepreneurial stack.

My conjecture here for an joint corporate-startup innovation community would be that:

• The community must be led by someone with both corporate and startup ecosystem experience
• The leaders must have a long-term commitment
• The community must be inclusive of anyone who wants to participate in it; AND the service providers need to be open enough to embrace collaboration, as none of a single organization would be able to make the collaboration program perfect
• The community must have continual activities that engage the entire entrepreneurial AND corporate innovation stack

Call for Partners and Co-Organizer

So this could be one of the latest if not last effort I’m pushing here in TTA as side project-either you’d be interested in joining as overall program architect, marketing, content provider, startup support, or co-organize as corporate/industry leader to drive innovation together, please do reach out and I’d share more about the current progress with you. My target is to build this platform that would be able to transform the mock up site into a live website by early June, and makes this into a community-driven platform that could lead to long term impact here in Taiwan and across the region.

Any feedback or suggestion would also be more than welcomed.