Corporate Procurement is Killing Startup Innovation

Steve Glaveski
The Startup
Published in
4 min readJul 2, 2019

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Speed is absolutely fundamental to innovation

But for so many of today’s traditional, large organizations, speed is not their strongest hand — in fact, it’s usually their 2–7.

Plagued with an environment of consensus-seeking, process paralysis, regulation, and legacy systems, traditional organizations which realize that they need to innovate — but often struggle to do so internally — are turning to startups and scale-ups.

By combining the domain expertise, assets, and resources of a large organization with the talent, tech, and speed of startups, good things are said to happen.

You Can Only Move as Fast as What’s in Front of You

When it comes to open innovation and working with external parties, corporate procurement often crashes the party, requesting the same kind of documentation from startups — who operate in a fundamentally different environment — as they do from large, established players in mature industries.

All in the name of arse-covering. 🍑

Here’s a small snapshot of just some of what a traditional organization typically requests from startups and scale-ups that they have an interest in working with.

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Steve Glaveski
The Startup

CEO of Collective Campus. HBR writer. Author of Time Rich, and Employee to Entrepreneur. Host of Future Squared podcast. Occasional surfer.