Hart held the session, “Corporate Innovation: Internal & External Best Practice,” at FEI. One of the reasons that good corporate startup partnerships succeed is due to a clear division of responsibilities based on what each party brings to the table. Corporates traditionally don’t move quickly due to refined and efficient processes. Startups, by definition, need to focus on finding scale.
If you could just tell us a little bit more about the session you conducted at FEI 2024?
“I’ve been working in corporate partnerships for the past seven years in a lot of different capacities, and I’ve just seen all the issues that can happen from both the corporate side and from the startup side,” says Hart. “Back maybe five years ago, I was facilitating relationships between corporations and startups. Now I work at Cornell Tech and really help corporations understand how to engage with academic startups, which is a little bit different sometimes than later stage startups. That’s kind of the focus now.”
In your role, you probably see a lot of what we term innovation roadblocks, especially when it comes to startups and partnerships. In your experience, what have you observed between the corporate world and these academics and startups?
“Regarding the four pillars that I’m talking about in my presentation, a key one is culture. Startups are small. Corporations, multinational corporations, usually can employ tens of thousands of people while startups can be a handful, at least under fifty employees. That’s why culture matching is so important. Both parties need to be able to speak the same language,” she says.
Hart continues, “Two other buckets are internal and external kinds of innovation. The ability to build teams internally within a corporation to be set up to work with startups and to be able to scout startups is significant to the formation of the venture, as well as having the right process and tools. It’s about making sure that companies have good processes for working with really small companies and making sure that their contracts are friendly to small companies, and their procurement processes are friendly to small companies, and so on. That’s something that’s hard for large corporations to do. That’s another pillar that we look at.”
FEI conducted several roundtables, and a lot of the discussion was about this kind of cross collaboration, interdisciplinary activity, and partnerships. For the corporate world, and for startups, would you say there’s a democratization of innovation happening? There are conversations about the democratization of data but also of innovation, of organizations being flatter. Should that help the corporate world with these startups?
“I think I’ve seen a lot of that broader accessibility at least within corporations,” says Hart. “It used to just be this siloed innovation team, they’re the only ones that are allowed to do the function. But that’s actually not very successful because then they’re not really able to pull in new innovations and send them to the right team. Using the phrase democratization is the ability to make sure that anybody within a company is able and empowered both from a cultural perspective in the organization and from a process perspective to be able to start new relationships with startups and bring in new technologies.”
Speaking of technology, artificial intelligence has been on everyone’s minds. What is your outlook in terms of innovation, partnerships and the future? How do you feel the future is shaping up?
“I am really curious to see what happens,” says Hart. “I think that startups have always been the kind of trope in that they move faster than corporations. I think it’s going to become exponential and corporations are looking to see what startups are going to overtake their industry or to overtake their business model. I think it’s just going to move faster. There’s that old statistic from a few years ago that the length of time a company stays on the S&P 500 has dropped one-third from 50 years ago. It’s going to get shorter, shorter, and shorter as AI becomes a technology to help companies move faster.”
For more of the interview with Carley Hart, check out the video from FEI 2024.
