Startup Communities, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER ELEVENHOW LARGE CORPORATIONS CAN HELP

Innovation has been a persistent buzzword throughout business for my entire working life, dating back to the early‐1980s when I started paying attention to business when I was in college. However, outside of the tech industry, most large companies (which I'll refer to as “corporations” in contrast to “startups”) have never been particularly, or consistently focused on entrepreneurship, unless the entrepreneurs are still actively involved in the business. While tech companies such as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon had clear efforts aimed at helping startups, many of these efforts were self‐serving, using powerful and time‐tested ways help startups in the near term and develop deep business relationships in the long term.

In 2012, Techstars began to work with large corporate partners. Through the accelerator model, Techstars ran several accelerators with large corporate partners, the first two being Microsoft and Nike, around the time the first edition of the book was published. Until then, I hadn't really explored how large corporations could effectively engage with a startup community. Over the ensuing years, I learned an enormous amount around how corporations could work with startups, both through ecosystems around the specific corporate initiatives or the geographic location of the headquarters of the corporation. Today, Techstars runs 50 accelerators around the world, 35 of them with the 80 corporation partners that Techstars ...