Big companies always say they focus on innovation. But as we know this is typically evolutionary rather than disruptive innovation because disruptive innovation doesn’t fulfill the short term margin needs of most big companies.
In the last few years the IT sector has seen, a succession of online startups delivering disruptive solutions that rocked established players e.g SuccessFactors . Predictably , these startups are bought for a premium price from the big IT players. It seems that big organization feel that they need to pay excessive amounts for proven “innovation”.
So what other choices do big companies have? It buying isn’t the best route what about growing your own? Having a Venture Capital arm enables companies to invest in businesses to varying extent, and has been successfully used by Telekom T-Ventures
What’s more beneficial though is to establish an incubator for startups . The main challenge good ideas and young startups facing are the search for capital. So a big company could start a campaign where they ask for ideas that are disruptive for their market .Based on this they could then choose one idea and the team.
So whats different from Venture Capital ? Big companies Incubators start subsidiaries together with the team of young people and the idea.. The shares are 80% Big companies and 20% to the team with the idea, therefore the big companies pay a normal salary in advance and give the new company an amount of capital and resources to start the company and develop a business model of success. The advantage of this subsidiary is definitely that they not facing the margin goals of the big markets they focusing more to develop a future business model for the big companies. One good example is media-entrepreneurs from Springer.
