100 open startups: connecting startups with corporate innovation strategies

Abstract

We are living a new revolution in innovation and entrepreneurship models. In 2003, Henry Chesbrough coined the term Open Innovation to refer to the phenomenon of opening up the innovation process of large companies as opposed to the traditional closed R&D model. In 2011, Eric Ries published the Lean Startup method which, coupled with the client development methodology created by Steve Blank in 2007, became the new paradigm for creating startups. Both phenomena have been changing the behavior of the ecosystem of innovation and entrepreneurship in an extremely fast pace worldwide. Beginning in 2015, the first surveys began to emerge on what is now known as Corporate Startup Engagement (CSE), with large companies opening up to the relationship with startups in the search for new interaction models for the co-creation of innovations. Although CSE practices have become quite popular in recent years in various regions of the world, especially in more developed economies, the effectiveness of the different approaches observed has not yet been proven. This project is a result of the collaboration that begun in 2013 among the Study Center in Private Equity and Venture Capital of FGV-EAESP, the Open Innovation Center Brazil - Wenovate, Allagi Engenharia Ltda. and the National Senai. Interested in developing, testing and validating new methodologies on how to efficiently and systematically connect startup communities and corporate innovation strategies, these entities have used the "Desafio Brasil" program as a R&D platform. "Desafio Brasil" was a competition of startups brought to the country in 2006 by Intel and lasted for 10 years until 2015. It had strong influence in the startups creation in the country. In all, more than 3,000 business plans were elaborated and evaluated throughout its existence. During its first 7 years, "Desafio Brasil" was operated based on a startups creation methodology developed by the Lester Center of the University of California - Berkeley. Beginning in 2013, with the cooperation formed among the mentioned institutions, the program started to adopt the project team's developed methodology called Open Startups. After 3 years of development, testing and validations, "Desafio Brasil" ceased and then the program "100 Open Startups" (100OS) was born. The leadership of the program is now Wenovate that brought to the program the adhesion of more than 70 major companies as its maintainers and of Allagi whose mission was to provide the technology that would support the method created and its evolutions. Launched in December 2014, the 100OS program has engaged more than 500 large companies, 4,000 executives and 3,500 startups. As a result of the method, more than 600 contracts were signed between startups and large companies of the program and the program became a world reference among practitioners and researchers of CSE. As a result of this effort and understanding that there is a great business opportunity there, Allagi decided to focus all its energy on improving the technology (digital platform) and methodology of the 100OS program and turning it into a world-class scalable product. (AU)