STARTUP/CORPORATE COLLABORATION

Finding the hidden gems in your company with AI

It’s a match! German startup Cobrainer & MHP collaborate to discover the smartest skill matches in organizational networks

• Cobrainer’s AI extracts ad matches skillsets based on semantic analyses
• Smart skill-matching becomes a crucial success factor for teams & companies
• Cobrainer and MHP — A Porsche Company entered into a partnership in 2018

Connecting the right people is an everlasting challenge — especially in a world where having the right expertise at the right time is a major factor for driving business success. Larger corporations face the additional paradox that, while they usually have an extensive pool of talented and highly qualified employees, they can rarely tap into all of their hidden gems due to limited inter-departmental flexibility, inadequate skill-sharing, and knowledge silos. So what can they do to ensure they find the right talents for the right jobs?

Enter Cobrainer, a smart skill-matching tool. While studying architecture at the Technical University in Munich, Cobrainer co-founder Hanns-Bertin Aderhold faced a plethora of obstacles while trying to find people with the right skillsets from other departments for his university projects. The mathematical model he and his team built led him to found Cobrainer in 2013. Since then, the startup has developed its AI-based technology and started working with large companies from the automotive, engineering, banking, chemistry, and pharma sectors.

Cobrainer’s AI matches skills by crawling professional and scientific articles, and deducting which abilities are often associated with and thus connected to related skillsets. Based on semantic analyses, its machine learning algorithm extracts and matches skillsets, which in turn enables companies to uncover the skills they have, and discover the skills required for a specific role, project, or team. The overarching insight into a company’s intellectual assets allows organizations to thus match their talent-pool and hiring needs better.

It’s the end of the {corporate} world as we know it

Skill-matching technology has entered the scene at a crucial stage. Increasingly agile teams come together based on their skills rather than hierarchies or fixed roles, and the work-life balance in companies is changing rapidly. And even though we don’t exactly know what the future holds, it is quite clear that the workplace of tomorrow will look inherently different from the cubicle-and-corner-office workplace of the past.

Let’s take a look at automotive companies, for example. OEMs used to be strongholds of engineering held to the highest standards of quality, safety, and customer satisfaction. But in the last decade, they have increasingly been transforming into software companies. This shift requires new & additional expertise and organizational flexibility.

For them, like many other large corporations in other industries, it’s crucial to have agile and flexible teams who are matched specifically for unique tasks and can move outside of outdated corporate barriers. But for these organizations, it’s incredibly difficult to identify what skills you have already, which areas you can develop with training, and which new skills you want to look for when hiring new team members.

“We believe that for every company, this is a matter of survival,” said Cobrainer founder Hanns-Bertin.

Let’s consider the other side of the coin. Many employees want to use the skills they have in their job and also be able to influence their career paths to their liking. Tell a millennial or Gen Z-er that they’re being boxed into the standard career trajectory of their current job for the next 30 years and watch them run home and cry about it to their 6 roommates.

Helping employees understand which skills they have and which knowledge is needed for different tasks and teams enables them to take their career into their own hands, as well as provide sustainable value to the company.

Skill-matching between startups and corporates — learnings from the collaboration with MHP

Cobrainer has evidently done some skill-matching on themselves. In 2018, the startup entered a cooperation with MHP, a management and IT consulting firm and subsidiary of Porsche with over 300 clients in mobility & manufacturing.

The match combines MHP’s decades-long industry expertise & in-depth technological know-how with Cobrainer’s expert solution. Their joint solution aims to support companies in their digital transformation, to discover and harness the potential of their colleagues, and to enable more employees to grow in their career.

As part of dynamics, MHP’s startup/corporate matchmaking arm, we followed along the trajectory of the collaboration to see what makes this partnership such a good match, how these two companies were able to overcome the plethora of challenges that make a large majority of startup/corporate partnerships fizzle out past the initial pilot project, and study the critical success factors along the way.

The biggest learning so far

As individuals have to adapt and learn new things to develop their skillsets, so do companies — especially when corporates start working together with startups.

“One of the biggest problems when bringing different teams together is the diffusion of responsibility — especially if you’re trying to bring teams from different organizations together,” says Cobrainer founder Hanns-Bertin. “You need clearly defined responsibilities. Ideally, you have two people — one representing the startup, one representing the corporate — to take on the project and fight for it.” He adds that, when starting a collaboration with a company of scale, it’s pivotal for startups to have an internal advocate within the corporate.

“As a startup, you need somebody within the larger company who fights for you, who feels responsible for the collaboration, and who defends you and your project.”

For Hanns-Bertin, this was Christian Frahm. “Without Christian, we would have never made it this far. He took on complete ownership for the project and had a clear product vision. He acted more like an intrapreneur than a project manager.”

The ‘internal advocate’ for Cobrainer and Senior Manager at MHP additionally emphasizes the importance of frequent communication and constructive & honest discussions between both the startup and the corporate:

“Both sides have to be open to constructive dialogue.”

It’s perfectly fine to disagree about something, and on a project of this magnitude, it’s almost inevitable. “You should be able to have a heated discussion and turn it into a success by listening to each other. Every side has different needs and perspectives– the wiser the partners, the more they try to understand each other.”

Cobrainer’s combination of AI-based technology, common human sense, and the agile mindset has proven successful so far. Together with MHP and with support from dynamics, Hanns-Bertin’s team are currently rolling out the technology to different clients from the automotive sector. The company is one to watch out for — we’ll make sure to keep you posted!