Startup Program Design

Businesses and governments engage with startups for myriad reasons - as a source of innovation or investment, or for entrepreneurial ecosystem building. Corporate startup engagement has deep historical roots in the corporate venture capital (CVC) era of the 1950s, if not earlier, but in the last two decades more program models have appeared: accelerators, hackathons, challenges, and other open innovation programs. There is no one size fits all in startup collaboration. Diversification and startup-centered design are becoming the key to attract the best startups for your context. The best corporate engagement is made up of a system of programs, a pipeline that goes from fertilization to exploration and finally exploitation. Our answer to successful corporate-startup collaboration programs is context-aware design. Any organization can build its own startup engagement system. They just need to open the box and pick out a model, briefly investigating why models work in the way they do. Let’s call it model hacking (lets call it accelerator hacking). It starts from the recognition that each startup engagement process sits at the center of equilibrium of three factors: what the organization is and can do (C1), what the program aims to achieve (C2), and what startups in your ecosystem need (C3). Together, they define a context. Each context deserves its own program configuration. And with a specific configuration also come specific success metrics, selection process, content, and follow-on. Each context also has specific startups that can do the job. Maturity level, ambitions, growth speed, business model or technology innovation, and other characteristics define different segments. Last, startup program design should also take into consideration how the corporate sponsor can capture the value created by the startups. Just copy-pasting GV or Y Combinator does not work anymore.