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How Working with HR Tech Start-Ups Drives Innovation at Unilever

Source | www-myhrfuture-com.cdn.ampproject.org | Caroline Styr

While we can question the hyperbole of Peter Drucker’s famous declaration, “innovate or die,” the sentiment remains true – organisations’ biggest challenge is to stay ahead of the pace of change, or put the company’s survival at risk.  

Despite the truth behind this statement, incumbent market leaders with the most to lose are the least likely to change: this observation was made by Edward H. Bowman over four decades ago. In an attempt to combat this, there has been an explosion in large organisations collaborating with start-ups, in an effort to unlock innovation and stay ahead of the curve. The number of new corporate venture capital groups grew by almost 300% in just five years, from 2010 – 2016.

In this article, we’re taking a look at “corporate venturing” – how large organisations engage with innovative start-ups. While typically these collaborations aim to innovate consumer-facing products and services, they can also be used to disrupt organisations internally as well. We look at a specific example of this from Unilever, a large organisation that developed their internal Talent Marketplace with HR tech start-up, Gloat.

1.      What is corporate venturing?

2.     Finding the balance between speed of innovation and cost

3.     Open innovation with HR tech start-ups

4.     Understanding short-term returns and long-term gains

5.     How Unilever collaborated with Gloat to develop FLEX Experiences 

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They say opposites attract and maybe this is true for large corporations and nimble start-ups. While large organisations are at greater risk of being slowed down with process, bureaucracy and risk aversion, start-ups set out to challenge the status quo, and are nimble enough to consider a continuous flow of new ideas.

Corporate venturing is used to describe large organisations approaching start-ups to explore innovation opportunities and collaboration. There are many different methods of engagement, which can be organised by 1) size of the start-up, 2) amount of investment required and 3) time to get results:  

Organisations can have teams dedicated to exploring these opportunities, for example IBM launched ‘IBM Venture Group’ in 2000. The team sits within Corporate Development, which is responsible for IBM’s M&A activity. IBM were one of the first out of the gate in creating this type of function, with research showing that the majority of companies have set up these units in the last 10 years.

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www-myhrfuture-com.cdn.ampproject.org
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