Partnerships between startups and corporates: is the matching really possible? And if yes, what is the window of opportunity for a successful collaboration?
For startups, collaborating with corporates allows gaining new clients and creating new development opportunities. The advantages are as follows:
- Serve as reference cases for future clients and thus increase sales.
- Allow to reach a larger market, as the corporate has a large portfolio of existing clients.
For corporates, collaborating with startups gives the opportunity to stay ahead of the curve on new technologies and business models. The advantages are as follows:
- Tap into the value of external innovation to continuously transform themselves.
- Allow to co-develop new solutions with the startup to serve existing as well as new clients and increase the product and service portfolio.
In order to develop into a win-win situation, partnerships must follow clearly defined goals and be mutually beneficial to the startup as well as the corporate. There are numerous partnership models to pick from, depending on the goals, duration and depth of the partnership. Let’s now take a look at some examples of collaborations that the BG Group has recently entered into.
The TUNE project, which benefits from public R&D funding from the Swiss Federal Office for Energy and SSIGE, has seen BG collaborate with the city of Pully, HES-SO and a valve manufacturer to improve the pressure regulation of a drinking water network while producing renewable energy with a new type of microturbine.
We are also proud of our partnership with Amics, a company specializing in automation technology for sewage as well as waste treatment plants, to jointly develop and bring to the market a Building Operating System (BOS) for sewage treatment plants. The beneficiaries of this collaboration will be our clients, with an integrated solution that helps them visualize, maintain and operate their facilities better than with existing solutions.
Other collaborations with startups concerns the following applications: recover resources such as natural gas and phosphorous from sewage treatment residues, increase the responsivity and agility of territorial energy planning when project durations last over years, generate 3D models based on 2D drawings of buildings using AI. All these collaboration benefit to our customers.
As can be seen from all these examples, the BG Group has a large experience with building partnerships. We are looking forward to receiving your application in this challenge
For the Boost My Startup Challenge Team,
Guillaume Kayser