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Corporates increasingly seek to be on the lookout of what is the next big thing to stay competitive in their industry, while startups are in need of infrastructure and market access. Corporates need to know what is going on in the startup world in their constant search for potential innovations. There are various ways to engage with startups as part of an efficient Startup Relationship Management. Finding the fitting startups in your business field is a great start to minimize the uncertainty and risks of the future. Startup scouting is a key element to bring external innovations to your organization.
Startups are an integral part of your external innovation sources. Startups oftentimes identify certain issues or challenges in the market or business process and apply new technologies to solve identified problems.
With a Startup Radar companies can visualize and contextualize all evaluated sources including recent technologies and patents, emerging trends, inspirations related to a company’s business environment. In other words, a Startup Radar represents the portfolio of technologies and trends adopted by startups which fall into a company’s ecosystem. By leveraging the benefits of using a Startup Radar, companies monitor startups in their ecosystem, identify the most promising ones and build future partnerships to steer innovation and build a competitive edge.
Benefits of using a Startup Radar
Spot Innovation Opportunities: connect startups with innovation activities, trends, and technologies and uncover the most beneficial innovation fields for your business and industry.
Startup Portfolio Planning: monitor corporate-startup relationships to make faster investment decisions and build sustainable startup-corporate partnerships.
Easy-to-find Results: due to well-designed filtering options, with only two or three clicks, it is possible to find the most important startups in the area of your search.
Inspirations matter: follow real-life examples connected to trends and technologies that could serve as inspirations. Having these inspirations next to the trends and technologies makes your Startup Radar more insightful.
Transparency for a Win-win: Make all startup data and sources accessible across all involved business units.
Collaborative Scouting: Foster collaborative participation, assessment, and other innovation management activities with different members of your innovation community.
Cutting-edge Technology: avoid resource-intensive desk research with proper automation. Collection of various sources on a single platform in a short time requires a lot of resources unless the system has a built-in AI.
Stay ahead of the Curve: discover startups impacting your business, industry or product in real-time and find out what drives future innovations before others do.
Best practice example: DZ Bank
Germany’s second-largest financial institution, DZ Bank, monitored the fintech landscape to understand the changes in the value chain within the banking industry. The Fintech Radar with a curated output on fintech startups helped the bank to gain a company-wide overview of all potential fintech cooperations. Based on predefined criteria of interest (e.g. customer benefit, earnings potential, suitability for the mass market), strategic evaluation of trends was conducted.
All the trends, technologies, and startups (external perspective) were visualized according to evaluation criteria in the Innovation Radar and mapped with the company’s internal innovation activities (internal perspective) to identify their strategic relevance.
As a result,
- company-wide Innovation Radar was created as a single source of reference
- strategic fields of action and gaps of the innovation portfolio were identified
- a company-specific fintech module was integrated to monitor the market and the existing corporate-startup partnerships
- over 120 employees from various departments contributed to the project
Breaking it down: ITONICS Startup Radar
As you see from the Radar screencast below, the startups are classified into various industries. The elements in the Radar have a specific color, size, shape and a certain distance to the center. The image below depicts the Disruptive Potential, Scouting Phase, Success Potential and the Degree of Innovation, all in a single view. New filter options such as Maturity Level, Professionality, Attention etc. can be added and the filtered output can be investigated in more detail. Based on your search, the elements on the Radar will reorder immediately.
What's more?
You can see in which scouting phase the startups are, for example, you want to monitor the startups you detected recently or only those you are in contact with. In the same space, it is also possible to reorder the startups based on their status and round of funding, geographic location, and more specifications.
Let’s say, you want to find recently funded urban delivery robot startups in the Bay area that leverage IoT technologies. After running all the filters of your interest, you are able to spot the most important startups in your search field. As every element on the Radar has a detailed profile page, where all the relevant information is condensed, the next thing would be the evaluation of the spotted startups based on different metrics. Finally, you now have identified the startup you want to partner with and together run a corporate accelerator pilot project or any other joint venture.
Discover how to streamline your startup scouting using the ITONICS Innovation OS.
