How can corporate accelerators succeed in an ever-growing bubble, find the best teams, startups and deals to create a countable added value for the industry?
The answer can only be to rewrite the rules of the game by focusing on the basic principles of pragmatism, aside from all the hype and buzzwords. Let’s take another look at the basic scenario:
Startups are inherently good at exploration — exploring new opportunities
But weak at execution because they lack the means to scale and gain traction in the market. Startups need corporations as customers to gain traction in the market and gradually scale. Since startups do not necessarily speak the language of the corporates and the processes are very complex there, they rarely achieve this by their own efforts.
By contrast, large companies are good at execution.
Because they already have traction strengths, including processes, customers, networks, resources, brand awareness etc. On the other hand, their optimized core business with a lower risk profile makes them weak in the “exploration” of new opportunities. Established companies, therefore, need, above all, innovations with added value, which fit in with the core business and contribute to the consolidated result. This can succeed with new solutions for internal efficiency gains or new offers for higher sales.
We should not be competing directly with universities.
In a market where there is more money waiting to be invested — just as before the .com bubble burst — startups do not come to us for the cash. Instead, startups can get support from the best universities and government agencies to secure their first 100k to 200k. Universities near institutions provide early coaching and education on how to create a startup. The teams come to us to do business with our mother company without logging countless meetings with company representatives.
