Startups and Innovation: Let’s strike the right balance between risk and reward!!

I agreed to take this role because I strongly believe that collaborating with tech startups needs to become the norm for any organization that wants to innovate and flourish in today’s digitally led world. According to the MIT/Capgemini Invent report on corporate innovation in the digital age, 44% of companies have stated that startups will be one of their top-three innovation sources by 2025. This is up from 10% in 2020, and this role is my opportunity to play a part in helping Capgemini’s clients exploit some of this!

I know that the idea of working with startups is a daunting proposition for some. They are quite often unknown entities, sometimes perceived as being led by maverick tech “geniuses,” and can vary wildly in terms of business model maturity. At Capgemini, we aim to reduce such concerns by leveraging our well-defined services to assess potential tech startup partners against key risk dimensions: management, business, technology, and financial maturity. Making informed decisions about which startups to include in partner ecosystems is best achieved by understanding the level of risk involved while adopting a changed mindset that has a higher tolerance for some of these.

We need to appreciate that startups operate in a very different way to established tech giants – and try to strike the right balance of risk versus reward when considering them! These are key ingredients if we truly want to unleash the power of startups to drive the ambition of sustainable innovation! Vasuja Kishore Salikineedy from my new team and Early Metrics, our startup rating agency partner, have co-authored a blog post that gives some insightful perspectives on how to reduce risk exposure when working with startups.

I really look forward to sharing more thoughts and engaging with you on the fascinating topic of startups! And do continue to look out for future blogs and vlogs that we will be publishing as part of this series.

 Thanks for reading.