The innovation market is growing steadily. In Russia alone, for 2020, the amount of transactions involving startups doubled to 21.9 billion rubles. Large corporations with stable positions in the market, income and a product worked out cannot ignore this. They understand that their competitiveness and stability in the long term depends on the introduction of innovation. These assumptions are confirmed by the study of the University of Washington: 40% of companies from the Fortune 500 list fail to keep their positions in the ranking if they have not accepted new business solutions within 10 years.

In pursuit of innovation, corporations resort to several methods: creating an internal department for innovation, corporate accelerators, their own venture funds and the purchase of ready -made businesses.

Russian companies mainly choose the acceleration path. Almost every large corporation has its own accelerators: Sberus, VTB, Gazprom Neft, Rostelecom, MTS, Yandex, etc. At the same time, despite the growth of their number, the volume of investments is reduced . Corporations are very careful when choosing and give preference to strategic partnership and joint piloted projects. Corporate venture funds are also found. For example, the “Sber” is actively working in this direction. According to PWC , together with Sberrix, the leading positions in venture investments in Russia are also occupied by Yandex, Mail.ru and MTS.

In all cases, whether it is acceleration or venture investment, corporations most often collaborate with those companies that have already developed a viable product, there is revenue and a team has been assembled. Since up to 99% of startups fail, such caution is already quite clumsy corporations.

Search your way

Innovation expert Gary Pisano notes that almost every corporation tried to bring to his staff the Spirit of Startup, but to no avail. Growing your own startup inside the company to solve specific problems is an idea at first glance promising, but in practice its implementation rarely leads to success. As a rule, corporations either buy ready -made companies, or invest in the later stages. Several reasons can be distinguished by which intra -corporate startups fail. They are united by the features of the internal device and established business processes.

First: corporations work mainly with services and products that have reached the stage of maturity. Any product goes through several stages of development: it appears, develops, grows, reaches the already mentioned stage of maturity and enters the plateau - when the market, the product, and the target audience are clear. Companies that have reached this point, as a rule, have a functional hierarchy, focus on management and control, focus on the effectiveness of processes, optimization of costs, maintaining a positive client experience. In general, the organizational structure of the corporation contradicts the spirit of the startup, whose team acts in conditions of uncertainty.

For a startup, due to rigidly limited resources, speed is important, while in the corporation a large number of processes and procedures are created to support business units.

Another reason is the level of individual responsibility, which is much higher in the startup. A young company cannot afford to maintain an incompetent employee, and in the corporation such a person can take a place for years, since his activity does not have a serious influence on the work of the unit.

The third reason for the failure of corporate startups, which Pisano distinguishes, is associated with the reluctance to take risks. The corporation is either not interested in this, or often cannot quickly make a risky decision due to complex agreements. Startup has no other choice, because the launch of the project itself is a risk.

Of course, in different corporations, the viability of startups differs. IT companies, like Google, Microsoft or Yandex, are much more flexible than large banks. But in addition to the corporate spirit, it is worth highlighting another factor - entrepreneurial activity. As a rule, strong businessmen prefer freedom and smart money from venture investors to work on the external market. Corporate venture-booking is a priori less free, but a safer environment imprisoned for internal needs. In many ways, therefore, truly bright startups for the mass are born outside the corporations.

Savage the element

About seven years ago, venture-booking companies began to appear all over the world. Venture builders, startup facilities, startups-a universal term for them never, most often they are called a “startup studio”. There are only about 10 such companies in Russia, including ours.

These are a kind of conveyors of innovative companies that take responsibility for a full cycle - from launch to access to profit or sale. If, with the help of accelerators, corporations are looking for existing startups under the implementation of their tasks, then startup studios can grow a company from scratch for a specific request.

Unlike corporations in startup studios, work on projects usually engage in entrepreneurs with experience in the development and sale of business. For example, in I-Free, startups are created with me by serial entrepreneurs: JUST AI co-founder Kirill Petrov, CEO CARDSMOBILE, Founder of the Kirill Gorynya, CEO B2B Fudtekh Project Nalanch Sergey Shulga.

Corporations can try to recreate such a model at home: give the unit freedom, take as a head of a person with great entrepreneurial experience, and provide options and shares. But in practice, another model is much more common - joint investments in an already created startup or search and purchase of a project for a specific task.

Another problem is due to the fact that corporations most often create startups for their market tasks and competencies, which limits the team and prevents the startup from passing the independent stage of Kastdev - the search for a successful market model. Without brewing, that is, without the opportunity to completely change the original idea, target audience or business model, the prospects for successful implementation are noticeably narrowed. But the stories of many leading companies show that their success would be impossible without such freedom of action. For example, Instagram grew out of a little-known Burbn Chekin Service. At some point, the founders realized that its unjustified multifunctionality interferes with the growth of the popularity of the platform and for a high-quality jerk, it is necessary to determine a narrow niche. The company concentrated on photo exchange, the result is known.

YouTube is another successful example of a startup brewery. Fleased as a deiting service, the channel was not popular. The initial idea involved the placement of short videos with attractive women for a reward of $ 20, but did not receive great demand. To increase interest in the project, the founders had to expand the format of the published content. From that moment, YouTube has become the main video hosting on the Internet.

Corporations usually build innovations around their main product, in their case, brewers are impossible. This greatly limits the scale of the search and the likelihood of success.

In addition, it is much more difficult to find managers in corporate startup teams. Classic startups are created for trading, so all employees motivates the opportunity to earn as much as possible from the sale of their share. When a young project is created for the development of the corporation, for an invited employee, this is more reminiscent of ordinary office work than entrepreneurship.

It turns out that the creation of a corporate startup is in a sense an attempt to saddle the element. But just as surfing differs from training in the pool, a real startup grown in a highly competitive market with limited resources will differ from the “indoor” project.

The author’s opinion may not coincide with the position of the VTIMES.

Why corporations rarely get startups