Shameen Prashantham - Gorillas Can Dance

In the Techstars model we take a cohort of 10 startup entrepreneurs who come together under one roof for three months to develop their concept, receive guidance and mentorship from experienced entrepreneurs, and refine their product and business model to pitch to investors. We coined the term “accelerator” and today Techstars has replicated that first accelerator in Boulder, Colorado, to nearly 50 geographic locations, across multiple verticals, and in partnership with some of the largest corporations in the world.

I provide this short history of Techstars not as a tribute to what we've accomplished but as a point in the timeline of Shameen's inspiring book that you now hold in your hands. Professor Prashantham began his journey documenting corporate-startup partnering in 2003 when Microsoft was first understanding disruption to its business model. Technology companies like Microsoft and others were vulnerable to “two people in a garage somewhere” inventing a technology that would make them irrelevant.

Companies outside of technology – manufacturers, distributors, or retailers, for example – would appear (in 2003) to be immune from business model disruption from startups but as Shameen clearly demonstrates, all global corporations face an imperative to innovate. As retired CEO of Ford, Mark Fields said, “ When I first joined the company, a long time ago, we were a manufacturing company. As we go forward, I want us to be known as a manufacturing, a technology, and an information company.… That's where we're heading.”

Today, while it's largely understood that every corporation must somehow become innovative and entrepreneurial, there's not as much understanding about how to do that. Part of the difficulty in partnering between startups and corporations is figuring out what to do: Do you buy a technology? Create an accelerator within your company? Develop a presence in entrepreneurial hotspots like Silicon Valley? Or deploy scouting teams in other entrepreneurial hotspots throughout the world? All of these tactics have been tried, but what will work for your company and how can you make it happen? More importantly, how can you get your leadership team to be on the same page? Gorillas Can Dance provides an excellent overview, with relevant case studies and examples, that will help gain alignment from leadership and management on corporate-startup partnering.

But part of the problem in partnering stems from very real obstacles in mindset, operating procedures, and resources that corporations and startups have within their DNA. A result of these obstacles is that corporations often view startups as risky – will the startup deliver on their commitment or will they just be a distraction? And for the startups, the questions about working with corporations are equally vexing – Can they trust the corporation to not take advantage of them?

Fortunately, for both startups and corporations, Shameen has spent the better part of the past two decades interviewing managers in a wide range of companies in China, India, Israel, Kenya, South Africa, United Kingdom, the United States, and other locations to provide more than imperatives and obstacles. The game-changer in creating corporate-startup partnerships that matters, that makes an impact, is the mindset of participants: entrepreneurial, collaborative, and global.

Professor Prashantham has effectively articulated what we experience and have understood at Techstars: it's not enough to understand that corporations and startups can partner to accelerate innovation, nor is it enough to understand the challenges and obstacles that make partnering difficult. The key is the mindset of the individual. Are you open to new ideas from diverse people, from diverse cultures? Are you willing to make sacrifices in personal or corporate gain to achieve a greater vision? Do you see the world as a blank canvas waiting for your creativity and potential to expressed? The mindset is about choosing authentic engagement with others in a way that provides hope for the future.

I believe we are in the very early stages of harnessing the ways in which entrepreneurship can be applied to global problems. It requires partnering between corporations, startups, communities, governments, nonprofits, universities, and a multitude of organizations. With the insights of Gorillas Can Dance , we now have a roadmap to help. As Shameen concludes, “Who knows? Perhaps working together may become so commonplace that a time will come when not many will need to be reminded of its potential, or even schooled in the nuances of the process.”

David Cohen

Co-founder and Chairman, Techstars

One of the best decisions I've ever made was to muster up the courage to ask the late Professor C. K. Prahalad, a respected strategy professor at Michigan University, a question at the 2006 Academy of Management conference in Atlanta. I explained to him that I had begun researching how startups were partnering with large corporations; I was curious to know if he thought this was a promising phenomenon or just a passing fad. His response was unequivocal: “Startups must learn to dance with the large gorillas.”

Thus came the phrase “dancing with gorillas” into my life.

I kept following this phenomenon. Microsoft proved to be a particularly fascinating example, and I was fortunate to be able to study its startup partnering activities as an independent academic. I was able to make observations over an extended period of time – a decade and a half – and across several locations including China, India, Israel, Kenya, the UK, the United States, and South Africa, among others (see “About the Research”). Importantly, corporate-startup partnering was part of that company's organizational transformation.

There were several other companies that I studied, too. Initially, the cases I came across resulted from ad hoc activities and happy accidents. Eventually, spurred by the growing ubiquity of digitalization, more systematic and deliberate efforts were made, initially by technology companies and later by ones from traditional sectors like automotive, banking, and retail.

In the process, a new notion was added to my lexicon: “gorillas can dance.”

By observing the phenomenon of large corporations partnering with startups over time, I've been able to better understand that the capability to partner with a highly asymmetric organization takes time and effort. By taking a deliberately global perspective I've been privileged to gain insight into how partnering practices are adapted to, and adopted from, different contexts.

Corporate-startup partnering has become an integral part of corporate innovation, reflecting a greater openness in companies' efforts to innovate. And while there are other ways of engaging with corporate innovation – including intrapreneurship and corporate venture capital – the fundamentals of the partnering perspective that this book deals with offer a useful perspective that is relevant to be incorporated in those other efforts.

This book shares some of the lessons I observed in the corporations that partner effectively with startups. It is written for the gorillas – the large corporations seeking to make their partnering efforts more effective. A key lesson for managers is that partnering with startups is great on paper, but not easy to do.

An important insight that I got as I studied many companies is what I call the “paradox of asymmetry”; that is, corporates and startups seemed to be attracted to each because they were hugely different and had things that the other wanted. Yet these very differences – or asymmetries – were what got in the way of effective partnering. This helped me better understand what distinguished corporates that were more effective than others in partnering with startups; they make deliberate efforts at overcoming the downsides of asymmetry while tapping the upside. Thus partnering with startups sounds like a great idea on paper for large corporations; making it work, however, is not so simple.