The thorny path to innovation
Startups are disrupting established industries and pushing corporates to innovate faster than ever. However, innovation can often be a loss of time, money and energy if not conducted with a good methodology. Corporates find their inspiration in start-ups but with an overload of hierarchical ranks, among other obstacles, they fail to be as efficient as they should. For example, key-people are not available every day for the project, which leads to overwhelming delays.
At Anova, we conducted a reflection about the different types of innovation, summarized here:
Software Leasing
If you have an unmet need, maybe someone has addressed it and developed a SaaS you can just lease. It is the easiest, fastest way of addressing your pain point. Sometimes you want to build it on your own, but there is no reason you should do it if you have no competitive advantage to develop a better or tailor-made solution.
Startup acquisition
When a solution has already been developed brightly but there is still a lot of innovation potential, you can choose to buy the start-up developing the product to help it grow and develop new services for your company or your customers: the acqui-hire solution. It looks like an expensive but easy solution, but pitfalls are numerous: sometimes a lack of alignment in interests or culture can erode the ability of the start-up to innovate efficiently, or to meet the corporate’s expectations in terms of innovation. It can lead to a situation where the founders would leave the company, whereas they might represent a significant part of the value of the startup.
Internal R&D
In some cases, the unmet need is so precise or difficult to address that it has not been yet developed by someone else. If for some reason you are the one in the best position to create it, you could develop it on your own. It’s time and money-consuming, but at the end it’s very adapted to what you need and the return on investment can be excellent. However, beware of the time and cost needed before starting the project, as the road will be long!
Corporate startup studio
Finally, it can happen that none of these solutions works well for you. The product you want may not exist, but you don’t feel you would be able to create it from scratch, even if your business expertise gives you a strong asset to know the features needed and understand what is at stake. In that case, a corporate start-up studio is a good fit, as their strengths are very complementary to yours.
Want to know more about it ? Visit anovastudio.com
