Thanks for the shout out, Chris. At KITE, we are indeed helping enterprises to establish their strategies, processes and ongoing operations to partner with startups at scale.
We're finding that "outside-in innovation" has become an
imperative for enterprise. Large corporations realize that innovation, in all
aspects of their businesses, is evolving rapidly outside of their "four walls"
and are pursuing a variety of programs to engage with emerging media, platforms
and technologies to unlock growth. In fact, KITE research finds that 77% of the
Fortune 100 have scouting, strategy, business development, corporate venture,
R&D or talent functions in top global tech centers to bring innovation into
their business. 62% of these companies engage in innovation partnerships to
test, learn and scale their efforts in new areas. See research here:
http://bit.ly/kitef100
The problem is that there are a host of issues that often prevent corporations from getting to deals with startups, or even beginning to effectively track the startup ecosystem, including pace, financial/payment systems, legal, workflow management and communications across the enterprise. In their 2014 report, "The State of Digital Business", Forrester reported that 68% of executives believe the functional units in their own businesses act as barriers.
At KITE, we've built software to address these barriers at ever stage, but I'm not here to sell you on that. We're seeing the corporate leaders that are truly moving their innovation practices forward moving along a spectrum from hypotheses to firm theses and processes about what actually works for their businesses.
A great example is Unilever. They started with the
Go Global program in 2013-14, a competition with seven brands in seven regions each choosing one emerging tech company for a pilot. The learnings from this endeavor led to the formation of
The Foundry, which, in its first year, received over 4000 applications, ran over 75 pilots and around half resulted in ongoing partnerships. It takes significant investment and a willingness to fail, but the value it's driving is immense.
Startups -- if you do want to reach enterprises for commercial partnerships, join us at KITE. It's 100% free for you and always will be:
getkite.co/startups
Corporates -- if you're interested in learning more about how we're helping enterprise power their innovation efforts, I'm happy to chat.