2020 Jan. 17 - Building "Collective WISDOM" at Creatoyo

filling collaboration gaps between corporations and startups

At encognize, we are convinced that every one, regardless of age, gender, citizenship... can learn from others and contribute to solve problems from the "real world" by sharing openly and discussing constructively their respective ideas and perspectives.
When it comes to innovation or entrepreneurship, one of the most obvious challenges we observe is how difficult it can be for startup and entrepreneurs to successfully collaborate with large corporations.
Therefore, we felt very privileged to engage with students from Toyo University during the Creatoyo week, a five-day program organized by the Department of Global Innovation Studies around one core theme: "understand creativity in a global context", and discuss how to solve the collaboration gaps between large corporations and smaller, emerging, innovative companies.

Our workshop "Mind the gap: Multinational companies & start-ups, collaboration and innovation patterns" held on Jan. 17 featured 5 guests with experiences in both startups and larger corporations:
. Yuki Kishi, Plug And Play Japan (Startup Accelerator / Investment)
. Waki Yoneoka, Moneythor (FinTech)
. Bruno Malik-Lacko, Shift Technology (InsurTech)
. Tomoko Minagawa, global brain (investment)
. Gen Uehara, Symphony (FinTech)
After an introduction of themselves, their business and sharing some of their experiences, each of our guests has then worked directly with the audience divided in small groups, studying a specific collaboration challenge and discussing best practices or strategies to overcome the challenge. Each group has then reported their findings to everyone at the end of the workshop, aiming at building "collective wisdom" on how to fill the various collaboration gaps.
The 5 corporation/startup collaboration gaps that have been discussed were:
1) Timescale / speed gap
2) Risk-taking / Urgency gap
3) Communication gap
4) Fundraising expectation gap
5) Technological knowledge and innovation approach gap
Identifying and involving executive stakeholders from the corporation early on, selling the idea first and finding a supportive corporate partner from the beginning, looking at a "joint venture" model with your corporate partner to be less dependent on existing structures, getting multiple presentation deck ready to adjust to your audience, building staff exchange programs between corporations and startups... were, among many others, some ideas discussed during the workshop.
We would like to thank here Toyo University, the students and our 5 guests for their very active contribution to this workshop.
​See you at the next Creatoyo edition!