With technological, business models and societal disruptions becoming more powerful and more frequent than ever before, many companies have put (open) innovation high on their agenda.
Despite its importance, however, a recent global survey of large cap firms shows that a staggeringly large proportion (94%) of global executives are dissatisfied with their organization’s innovation performance.
Together with PwC, AMS generates new knowledge and solutions to bridge this performance gap. In our 7 year partnership, we focused on different topics:
Measuring and reporting on innovation: Investigating the challenges and best practices in measuring innovation and building relationships with C-level.
Does size matter in corporate venturing? Understanding the difference in how SMEs vs. corporates do venturing.
Corporate venturing barometer: Giving insights into the corporate – start-up collaborations.
We aim to develop new insights on how corporates and start-ups can reinforce each other and innovate successfully together.
—
Robin De Cock, PhD, Professor in Innovation & Entrepreneurship
Our network partners
1. Measuring and reporting on innovation
Measuring the return and impact of corporate venturing initiatives and the innovation unit in general is critical to understand how innovation works or doesn’t work in your company.
Companies seem to struggle in conducting a fair and thorough analysis of the innovation activities. A global study including 1.590 executives (representing all major markets and industries) shows that 74%
of executives believed that innovation tracking should be included in central business processes, but only 43% of
companies actually measured their innovations. Furthermore, 59% of the companies noted that their innovation
performance measurement system was not effective (Dewangan and Godse, 2014).
It’s time to investigate this and understand:
what the challenges are in measuring and reporting on the return on innovation;
how we develop strong key performance indicators (KPIs) for innovation and;
what the best practices are in managing the relationship with the C-level.
In the report, we present the results of in-depth analyses of decades of research on this topic, combined with interviews with innovation leaders of 18 different companies coming from 5 different countries (BE, NL, GER, UK, US), aiming to provide more guidance for those in charge of innovation.
Corporate venturing: challenges in measuring return on innovation
With the increase of technological, business and societal disruptions, innovation climbs even higher on corporate to-do lists. With it comes the increasing importance of corporate venturing, which provides as many opportunities as it does challenges. This article is the first in a series of three, and explores the challenges in measuring the return on innovation.
5 key questions to build KPIs for innovation reporting
This second article in our series of three on corporate innovation focuses on the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) innovation leaders use to report and communicate their progress. These metrics assess the success and effectiveness of innovation efforts, provide information about achieving the desired goals, help detect problems and encourage behaviors consistent with the company’s drivers. Interviews with 15 innovation leaders from 5 different countries helped define 5 key questions to develop strong innovation KPIs.
Managing relationships with C-level executives as an innovation leader
This third article in our series of three on corporate innovation focuses on the challenge of developing strong relationships with C-level executives, when measuring and reporting innovation progress. Interviews with 15 innovation leaders from 5 different countries helped define 5 key practices to engage CEOs, CMOs and CFOs in the innovation journey.
If you think corporate venturing, or corporate-startup collaborations, is just for large companies, think again! SMEs show increasingly more interest in partnering up with young promising companies. AMS and PwC conducted a research on the question if size matters in corporate venturing, and discovered a couple of interesting insights
Together with PwC, we have developed the Corporate Venturing Barometer to determine the state of cooperation between corporates and start-ups in Belgium. One of the conclusions is that this is only happening more and more: both parties are increasingly looking for ways to collaborate with each other. During the studies we conducted on this subject, the number of collaborations increased from 20 to 23 percent. In our latest survey, 41 percent of corporates indicated that they would focus even more on corporate venturing in the future.
The Art of Corporate Venturing
Based on research and expertise, contextual drivers for successful collaboration between start-ups and established organizations are defined. In addition, specific challenges and drivers for setting up strategic partnerships are discussed.
In
this second white paper of our research project ‘The Art of Corporate
Venturing’ we shift our focus towards the perspective of established
firms. We explore 5 broad types of cooperation and link them to elements
such as ‘CSC intensity’, ‘Motivation for CSC’, ‘Strategic performance’,
‘Financial performance’ and ‘Internal vs External innovation’.
Kickstarting your Corporate-Startup Collaborations
The coronavirus crisis is proving once again that companies investing in innovation emerge stronger from a crisis than their peers. They not only survive, they manage to thrive. One way to innovate and keep your company future-fit, is to collaborate with startups. In this white paper we present various forms and inspiring best practices of startup-corporate collaborations.
In this third edition of our CV Barometer we compare important figures with the insights of last years and we added a section on the impact of COVID-19 on CSC. Although the pandemic hit us hard, we notice, both for EFs and YFs an increased intensity of collaboration (+70% of respondents). We tried to capture the crucial insights in this presentation. If you want to discuss more findings, please do reach out to us.
In this second CV Barometer we compare important figures with the insights resulting from our research of last year. Where the appetite to collaborate is growing among established firms, we notice a small decline among young firms. It is this dual perspective that defines the value of this barometer. We try to capture the crucial and most interesting insights for both types of firms.
Corporate Venturing is on the rise. A growing number of corporations recognize the value of collaborating with start-ups to enhance their innovation powers. However, an important question remains: how to do this in the best possible way to make the cooperation a success for both the corporate and the start-up? This research aims to get insight into best practices and guidelines in order to better organize and drive corporate – start-up collaboration.
