Brochure design for Partnerd

Importance of startup-corporate partnership Exploring the benefits in innovation and branding

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WHO IS PARTNERD AND HOW WE CAN HELP Today’s corporates face imminent threat of disruption posed by technology, consumer behaviour and an evermore decentralised economy. As a result, corporates are increasingly establishing internal and external programs to promote a culture of innovation. Although a relatively new movement, it has become evident that those programs involving a level of collaboration with startups yield more successful outcomes.

Partnerd can help your organisation or department improve your agility by matching you with our network of quality startups, SMES, online influencers and community organisers for your projects. Partnerd is perfect for: • Connecting Corporates to Startups for consulting, micro-tending, fast prototyping and to solve corporate problems.

• Connecting Corporates to targeted communities for hackathons and competitions to identify business solutions.

• Facilitating Corporate staff intrapreneurial training programs (adopting entrepreneurial techniques and skills) through co-innovation labs.

• Connecting Corporates to Startups through resource sharing and supporting community initiatives to develop the Startup ecosystem.

• Connecting Corporates to Startups for community value adds, employee perks and membership benefits.

• Connecting Corporates to Startups, SMEs and online influencers for targeted campaigns.

The right corporate-startup collaboration is extremely beneficial but also extremely difficult to facilitate. One of the main problems is how to identify the right startups for partnership, since the vast majority of startups do fail, thus most ideas are not commercially viable.

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It is shown that startups that are associated with an ecosystem such as Fishburners and Hub are more likely to succeed. Based in Australia’s leading startup space Fishburners, Partnerd is connected with more than 600 of Australia’s best startups. Partnerd helps systemise and simplify the process of corporate-startup collaboration by acting as the matchmaker and facilitator.

We screen and qualify our entire network of startups for corporate partnerships based on their track record, capabilities, brand perception and company values. We can help quality control the partnership process whether it is product codevelopment, procurement, outsourcing, events or marketing campaigns, and provide guidance on the risk mitigation process for the involved parties.

Networks Partnerd can reach

• 600+ Australian startups • 2700+ Global startups • 1000+ Online influencers (bloggers, youtubers, instagrammers) and community organisers • 67 000+ SMEs through partner networks

CASE STUDIES OF CORPORATE STARTUP PARTNERSHIPS

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Product Co-Development Partnership: AT&T - SundaySky

perception, higher retention rate and growth in net promoter scores.

The partnership between AT&T, an American telecommunications company, Amdocs the providers of customer care and billlers for telecommunications companies and SundaySky a personalized video experiences startup is a leading example of co-product development that allowed video technology to change the way customers interacted with their online bills. (may be start with A leading example of co-product development…. then list the companies

The technology also proved to be a great solution for AT&T to reduce its customer service costs relating to ‘billshock’ inquiries, as the company identified that the first 90 days of the customers experience were most costly due to the high volumes of call ins regarding bill confusions. The video explanation also encouraged customers to perform actions at the end of the video such as opting in for paperless bills.

AT&T utilised Amdoc’s billing systems to feed its customers billing into SundaySky’s smart video technology, delivering the technology to new customers as a real time narrated video bill explanation of the different sections of their bill addressing any questions that customers may have. This resulted in a personalised and unique experience leading to a better customer

AT&T has a well established system for their innovation collaboration projects, and this we believe is the main reason for their success.

Instead of simply seeking solution to existing business problems internally, AT&T has created an effective system to source, validate and collaborate with startups.

Marketing Partnership: Optus

Marketing Partnerships come in many forms, outreach and cross promotional partnerships being one of the most popular and effective as it helps the brands reach targeted audiences through their partners, who have already established trust.

Optus partnered with Airbnb to create a campaign where both sides were targeting travellers, enabling overseas travellers to stay connected. Optus customers new to Airbnb were offered a $50AUD voucher for any booking over $100AUD. Australian guests new to Airbnb were offered a free $30AUD Prepaid SIM to use on international roaming.

Optus also partnered with entrepreneurial education community The Entourage to align itself as an innovative entrepreneurial company.

The Entourage promoted the Optus Shark Tank competition through a pitching contest at the Entrepreneur’s Unconvention and through promoting the competition to the community using online mediums. The winner of the competition received mentoring from successful entrepreneurs Jodie Fox, Co-founder of Shoes of Prey and Janine Allis the Founder of Boost Juice.

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Community Partnership: Community and Social Causes

Corporates partner with startup communities to build networks and identify corporatestartup collaboration opportunities. Community partnerships can take the form of sponsorships, incubators and accelerators. Fishburners, Australia’s largest community of technology startups is a central hub for corporate-startup partnerships, a great example of a corporate sponsored space.

Sponsored by Google, Amazon Web Services, Optus, Xero, Newscorp, Price Water Coopers and Dropbox, Fishburners’ coworking space provides startups with operational support and membership benefits. The involvements are beyond simply monetary input, for example, as a partner, Optus provides selected startups with dedicated coworking spaces in aims to build the community and identify co-investment opportunities, whereas Google, Amazon Web Services, Xero and Dropbox provides substantial services perks to the startups.

The space frequently host hackathons, competitions and industry specific events to create business solutions and meet industry

needs. A great example of a community building exercise focused on identifying business opportunities is the Startup Weekend initiative.

Which attracted support from Google for Entrepreneurs and Optus, they hosted the event where teams launch a startup in 54 hours held across different cities at coworking spaces including Fishburners.

Procurement: Suncorp - Trov

Rather than building their own technology to solve existing corporate problems, corporates can benefit from partnering up with emerging startups to adapt startup technology.

The partnership between Suncorp Insurance

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and US startup Trov is a great example of procurement and marketing partnership. Trov is a mobile application which allows it’s users to organise information about the things they own, users can take ‘stuffies’ - images of their possessions, store information, see each item’s market value and reference receipts.

It also allows users to track the value of their possessions over time. The Partnership allowed Suncorp access to cutting edge information technology without the cost of developing a solution and validating the product internally.

As Queensland’s largest insurer, Suncorp know that their customers often set up their insurance and then forget to update the replacement costs of their contents leading to underinsurance as

seen in the 2011 floods, where one in three Queenslanders were not adequately insured.

This partnership is able to solve this problems for their customers, as well as increase Suncorp’s revenue and simplify the tedious record and claim process, thus decreasing their operational expense.

The partnership makes suncorp the exclusive Australian insurance provider via Trov and required Trov to make minor developmental changes in order to integrate Suncorp’s services.

In the first phase of the partnership, the users of the app are able to get in touch with Suncorp customer representatives to discuss the range of options for their contents, effectively generating highly qualified leads for Suncorp.

In terms of marketing benefits, this collaboration allowed Suncorp to leverage Trov’s existing database and reach a younger mobile savvy audience. The partnership includes an integrated marketing campaign to promote the significance of insuring items to the younger generation who own expensive portables. As a result it has aligned Suncorp’s brand with an innovative technology company and helped opening up new revenue streams at minimal cost and risk to the organisation.

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Summary

Innovation is inherently difficult for large structured organisations, as it requires high levels of agility, culture and disruptive thinking as documented by Clayton Christensen in The Innovator’s Dilemma. These are however intrinsic characteristics to startups, which is why we have witnessed the recent insurgence of technology startups such as Uber and AirBnB. Using the lean startup approach, these young companies can rapidly iterate their product offerings, test the market and go through an entire product development cycle within weeks.

A combination of corporate ability and entrepreneurial execution appears to be a perfect match, working collaboratively with startups enable corporates to develop and test new technologies and solutions with significantly less costs and risks to their core operation. The collaboration can also inspire employees with entrepreneurial thinking and help rejuvenate corporate cultures. There are additional benefits of improved brand perception, both internally and externally among their customers, partners and employees.

PARTNERSHIP AND COLLABORATION A recent Nesta report argued that there are no industries or companies that are free from the threat of disruption. Established brands can either fight or collaborate. Fighting involves building internal approaches such as poaching the best talents via recruitment, acquisition or building incubators. These are effective solutions although various research have shown that it is far more valuable to figure out how to leverage the innovation that startups have accomplished through mutually beneficial partnerships, this way, corporations can sustain the benefit from startup thinking.

Partnerships and collaboration ranges from short term transactional engagement such as one-off competitions to product co-development and procurement. Unlike funding and acquisition, these collaboration methods require lower levels of resource commitment and are suitable for solving business problems quicker at a lower risk, as well as prototyping products and validating new concepts.

One-off events

One-off events are relatively less resource intensive, they are good ways to test the water and expose employees to entrepreneurial mindsets in order to start internal culture rejuvenation. They can also attract positive public relations and create a brand association with innovation. Hackathons with a challenge price is a great example of a one-off event, where a large group of programmers, creative thinkers are gathered for a period of intensive development around a common goal to provide the corporate with new solutions. It is most effective to supplement these events with longer term partnerships in order to explore and flesh out the solutions.

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Product co-development

These partnerships require joint research and development of products or services that tackle business problems of the corporate or their client. The solutions are collaboratively specified, developed and then tested. These kinds of partnerships can be challenging as it depends largely on a clearly defined brief, pre-established budget and mutually agreed upon timeframe. In order to make the process more smooth, it is important for the corporation to design a milestone based project where it can continuously assess the progress and determine whether they want to proceed after the initial pilot. This is extremely suitable for concept validation, rapid and affordable product prototyping.

Procurement

This brings significant benefits to corporates to get access to innovative technology and sometimes new business models. It is the quickest way to find new and more effective solutions to business problems and often time opportunities. In a partnership context, startups can better adapt their existing technology to the corporate’s challenges, and help corporates identify other potential opportunities in the process. This significantly benefits startups in the sense that they are gaining a corporate as a lead customer which can often be the tipping point between success and failure, an important motivation factor in these partnership arrangements which have increased the odds of a successful outcome.