Gorillas Can Dance

CHAPTER FOURBUILDING THE CAPABILITY TO PARTNER WITHSTARTUPS

While our organization was very good at working with large partners, this was the first time we had engaged with partners at the opposite end of the spectrum. Talk about a learning curve for us! At first, most startups were actually a bit confused when we approached them …

– A large corporation manager¹

LEARNING TO PARTNER WITH STARTUPS

It is one thing to understand a specific partnering process (such as the synergy-interface-exemplar framework discussed in the previous chapter), but quite another to be able to learn to partner with startups as a repeatable activity. Embedding the capability to partner with startups within the organization – that is, making it an institutionalized practice – calls for a broad-based process of learning a new capability. Only then can a corporation hope to attain valuable outcomes through startup partnering in a consistent and somewhat predictable fashion. Or to put it another way, without a startup partnering capability, partnering with startups may end up merely being a one-off activity, and no more than innovation theater, which is a waste of time for all concerned.

While cultivating the first exemplar (or set of exemplars) is undoubtedly valuable, it's also important to go beyond that so it doesn't seem like a fluke or one-off. This is where it becomes prudent to consider how corporations can build a new partnering capability.

Compared to in-house operations or even external ...