Neil Soni is the author of The Startup Gold Mine: How to Tap the Hidden Innovation Agendas of Large Companies to Fund and Grow Your Business. Neil spent years with startups, focusing on the sales and marketing side, trying to sell into large organizations. He then moved to Estee Lauder, where he specialized in external innovation. After seeing both sides, Neil wanted to create a resource to help startups understand the corporate side and corporations to understand the startup side.

- - Neil Soni will be at the IO2022 Innovation Accelerated, Lincoln, NE - Sept 19-20. - -

Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Cofounder, spoke with Neil about how to succeed through corporate/startup collaboration.

Pitfalls of Corporate and Startup collaboration
 - Different timeframes
 - Size of deals
 
Incentive structures for partnerships
 - How comfortable is the corporate team in innovating? If comfortable, they’ll have a higher tolerance for misses. Look at the entire portfolio.
 - Companies that allow intrapreneurship, give employees new outlets to thrive.

Should you expose corporates to startups?
 - Inside large companies (10,000+) it’s an echo chamber. They only see direct competitors.
 - Need someone looking outside at competition. Expose the corporate team to new ways of startup thinking.
 - Startups also get exposure to see how their tech can apply to different domains.

In The Startup Gold Mine Book
 - Understand what is going on behind the scenes. What is your corporate counterpart doing?
 - How is your colleague rewarded or punished? Are they paid for the home run? Are they new to the company?
 - Corporations have been very interested in the book to shed light on the startup side.
 - Reduce the language barrier between corporates and startups.

To connect with Neil go to neilsoni.com or on Twitter at @therealneils. You can also get his book, The Startup Gold Mine on Amazon.

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Originally released April 2019