Bringing innovation and creativity of start-ups together with the experience and immense project scope of Siemens Mobility, our Start-up Partnering Unit is a collaboration driver to leverage cutting edge technology. In this story I am talking about the idea behind Station X and what both internal and external stakeholders can expect.
At our Start-up Partnering Unit, we aim to bring our technical experts together with innovative start-ups that offer unique technologies in a seamless way to propel innovation and impactful solutions at Siemens Mobility. Our goal is to foster long-term partnerships between start-ups and our business units to scale together and create business impact for both sides.
What made us form a unit like this?
The world around us is changing faster than ever and the way businesses prevail or perish changes with it. No longer is being a big or established corporation a guarantee for continued success. The average tenure of S&P 500 companies shrank from 33 years in 1964 to 24 years in 2016 and will very likely be reduced even further to only 12 years by 2027.
Eric Pearson, CIO of the International Hotel Group claimed “It’s no longer the big beating the small, but the fast beating the slow.”
I firmly believe this to be true and have experienced that during my years in corporate innovation. It is not possible to deliver meaningful and novel solutions in all of your fields, especially if you are a huge company like Siemens Mobility. But that isn’t at all necessary. Fortunately, there are countless of smaller businesses and start-ups that do just that: provide fantastic ideas and technologies that can help us advance and who in turn can benefit from applying their solutions on our major-scale projects. So, to conclude my point: This is exactly the reason we created the Start-up Partnering Unit. It is our goal to facilitate between said businesses and our own technical experts in order to maintain ongoing dialogue about new technologies and innovation in real world projects.
So why not just found an accelerator like other big companies? What sets us apart?
Well, as an accelerator we would invest in start-ups to help them grow their ideas and technologies which we could hopefully use in the future. That is a completely different thing. We do not accelerate business growth of start-ups by investing in them, hoping that one day we can benefit from their solutions. We try to find start-ups with innovative technologies that are already capable of doing pilots and handling big projects with us.
In that regard, Siemens Mobility’s work with these start-ups is more a collaboration with mutual benefit, in a sense that we become a client to the start-up to boost their business.
While start-ups get a chance to employ their technology in real world projects on a grand scale, we are able to deliver innovative and up-to-date project results.
And what is our job in this regard?
You see, we know that corporations and start-ups often work at different paces facing different challenges.
When these two worlds ‘collide’ without proper facilitation, there are a lot of potential problems that could make an otherwise fruitful business relationship quite difficult. With our experience in both Siemens and the start-up world, we know both worlds quite well. Our goal is to build a bridge between both to make collaboration as beneficial as possible. A very important part of our jobs is scouting new start-ups and new technologies either on our own account to make suggestions or at the behest of our technical experts who think one of their projects could benefit from a specific technology. We establish communication between our technical experts and start-ups. But instead of an outsourcing unit, I rather see us as a facilitator between both small but capable businesses and our technical experts, ensuring to make collaboration as easy and smooth as possible for either party. That means we evaluate and actively scout for start-ups and capable technologies as well as mediate between our technical experts at Siemens Mobility and a start-up, making the on-boarding easy and seamless. We take care of
- due diligence,
- will support with preparation and monitoring of the projects,
- and we will take care of legal and organisational matters.
How would we describe the collaboration between Siemens Mobility and start-ups?
We are stronger together! Our R&D unit is fantastic. But we also see huge potential in technologies from outside of Siemens Mobility. Plus, by incorporating great solutions that have already been developed by someone else, we can focus our efforts on new and unique things ourselves. Working with start-ups should come natural to our technical experts and should fit seamlessly into their way of doing things. We act as a matchmaker and facilitator with the goal to foster long-term partnerships between start-ups and our business units. And to make our collaboration sustainable in the long run, we aim to scale together with our partners and create business impact for both sides.
What are we looking for in start-ups?
Well, that depends on the respective projects a bit, of course. But generally speaking, our assessment makes sure we weed out any company that is not or not yet ready for collaboration with us. This is actually in both sides’ interest. To make sure working together with a specific start-up is fruitful, we only consider it for collaboration if it matches different criteria. We need start-ups to have funding from an institutional investor as well as a market-ready product.
But also it is important for us that the company is a strategic fit for us and our business units and also solves a potentially huge problem for us. For a final step, we define a proof-of-concept project, to prove the technology will work for us before we decide on how to proceed together.
So we are pretty selective about who we’re working with.
In total, less than 5% of potential start-ups pass the assessment. But like I said, this is something that is also in the start-ups interest. Of course, we ourselves want collaboration to go off without a hitch. But this rigorous assessment also keeps start-ups that are not ready for a project on this scale from being held up in a project that is bound to fail.
What ideas are we trying to convey internally? What philosophy is behind our work that we think should absolutely seep through to everyone at Siemens Mobility?
If I have to bring it down to one thing, it would be as simple as: Be curious! At our Start-up Partnering Unit we are continuously confronting our business units and technical experts with new and upcoming technologies or services. We strive to always be open minded and eager to learn how new technologies will push the boundaries of the status quo in our industry. Each and everyone of our projects has the potential to spark new developments or even establish an entirely new market segment! Start-ups are amazingly good at exploration and really disrupting our common way of doing things. But they usually lack the experience to scale and gain traction on the markets and thus are weaker at execution. Corporations on the other hand are usually fantastic at execution because over the years they have established customers, networks, resources and brand awareness, all of it! But the optimized core business makes it harder for them to explore and seize new opportunities. And I firmly believe that bringing these two worlds together holds the potential to really impact our companies and, our industry I am incredibly excited to drive that kind of innovation. Here, we can enable ourselves to innovate at a high speed. Powered by entrepreneurs and start-ups, we uncover new opportunities and overcome mobility’s biggest challenges.
Let’s collaborate! We are looking forward to hear from you.
