A website, a Twitter account, a few tweets to announce and maintain the first call for applications, and in February 2014, the first season of acceleration was launched. This launch was, in my opinion, as much in the realm of improvisation as it was in the realm of reflection, and I am quite unable to say what was prevailing at the time. Action took precedence, with all the risks that this entailed and with confidence in our desire to succeed. In fact, I remember the launch day (with media support). Originally, neither I nor my collaborator were foreseen being in the “photo” or to telling our story…. A curious approach on the part of large groups to hide those who had done things in reality.
Since then, many seasons followed one another. The corporate accelerator even diversified its program offerings over the years. In addition to my national roles, I have even taken on a coordinating role in the world of corporate accelerators that have sprung up in many countries. Each corporate accelerator recruits start-ups at the national level for national business partnerships. The most promising start-ups are “exported” to other markets by being supported by the corporate accelerator of the market concerned. This is called cross-acceleration. We are now a network of corporate accelerators on four continents, a unique asset for my company and what I believe is unique in the world. A fine mechanism that all those who are proud of, wherever they are in the field, at headquarters or internationally, have believed in it not by words, but by action.
I.5. You (really) want to know everything!
Let me share with you what you will discover in this book. This is the second one. The first one I entitled “Open Innovation, Corporate Incubator”, the fruit of my doctoral thesis, was, as I like to say, halfway between “the academic” and “the general public”. By that I mean that my point may have seemed a bit too elaborate. I’ll take it! The aim was to understand how open innovation works using the artifact (representation) of the corporate incubator. Theories were inevitably shared, but the expression of the field was favored (mainly managers of corporate structures supporting start-ups). For this second opus, you will judge for yourself the accessible nature of the work. “Everything you always wanted to know about the relationship between start-ups and large corporations, but never dared to ask” could have been its title in reference to Woody Allen’s film “Everything you always wanted to know about sex, but never dared to ask”. As you can imagine, my theme is somewhat different, although we’ll often talk about marriage.
In the overall system that a company and its environment constitute, managers of open innovation systems act as architects whose main raw materials are interactions. They have to forge and then manage the latter in order to contractually marry the protagonists of two different worlds: the CEO of a start-up and the employee of a large group. Each of the two protagonists will interact with their own personalities and beliefs. In addition, their respective “families” (mentors, etc. for the CEO, and colleagues, etc. for the employee) are also involved in this marriage.
The aim of this book is to explicitly describe the daily interactions that need to be implemented to transform these one-to-one, or one-to-many, interactions into tangible (business partnerships) and intangible (satisfaction in the relationship) values. Through my experience, I will try to give an account of the words and behaviors of the protagonists encountered during all these years. My observations will allow me to better understand the perspectives that everyone gives to each other in the interactions, to better understand the perceptions that arise from them. It is the reality of the interactions themselves that will thus be exposed in order to know how to get the best out of them. The conclusions will broaden the scope of reflection beyond the business world. Indeed, human interactions to generate value (in the broadest sense) are not only a necessity in the professional field but also in the personal field. The place of humans in any system is essential. They need to find it to move forward and generate value. On balance, it is our behavior towards others that is in question.
I.6. The three parts
To introduce you to this world of corporate open innovation, and what the players have to do to make it work, I have structured this book in three parts.
The first part honors the protagonist that I consider the first solution: the entrepreneur. If there was no entrepreneur, there would be no corporate open innovation. The entrepreneurial journey will be revealed to you. There you will discover women and men, like you and me. Women and men that events have led to a shift towards entrepreneurship. But is it events that make us change our ways? Is it not rather our way of reacting and this little flame that each of us carries within us that acts? I’ll let you make up your own mind. In any case, for me, starting out from these journeys is first and foremost a way of sharing a deep conviction: entrepreneurship is first and foremost a life project and an experience that should allow you to earn a living.
It requires a certain way of thinking. This is called the mindset. This is the subject of the second part of the book. It will be a question for me of drawing up for you, based on a concept known from literature (digest), the portrait of the entrepreneur. But not only that! Indeed, we will also talk about the portrait of a classic employee within a large organization. Are entrepreneurs and employees of large organizations alike? Besides, when these two protagonists want to work together, is it simple or complicated? What are the obstacles in front of them? And besides, entrepreneurs and employees of large organizations both have their own environments. How can these environments interact? The questions that this second part seeks to answer are numerous, as you can see.
I could add one more: what is the role of the corporate support structure for start-ups? Well, that simple question took me a whole section to deal with. This is the subject of the third part of the book. Who are these people who work in the corporate support structures of start-ups? What do they actually do and why do they have to act in a certain way if they want to succeed? I might as well tell you that I’m going to take the time to explain all this to you. It is not for me to tell you “that’s the way it is and that’s that”. Everyone has their own experience. Mine, I just want to share it with you by starting from the reality of the field and by enlightening it with literary concepts (digestible I remind you). It’s up to you to judge whether this advances the debate on the relationship between start-ups and large groups. For my part, I tend to consider that debates lead all the more to progress when we want to connect with the reality of these same things.
At the end of these three parts, I think you will have a slightly more precise idea of the experiences of entrepreneurs, the experiences of employees of large organizations and the experiences of those who are seeking to marry these two worlds. Not easy, but solvable, if we take into account one fact: the human! It is an obvious “given” … and yet when you take the time to read articles on the relationship between start-ups and large groups, you are surprised to realize that you will probably hear more about innovative solutions, investments, technological integrations and finally very little about these humans. In my opinion, they are the ones who do or don’t do things, so they are the ones I’m interested in….
