Startup + corporation = a recipe for success

Combining the resources of a small company and a large company is lethal! In a good way.

Small companies are usually agile, fast thinking and lean in their every move. They have the stones to try things out and don’t need several meetings before making a decision.

Large companies are the opposite of this. However, these more established enterprises have resources that small companies can only dream of. When you combine these two worlds it is a “company cocktail” that has the ability to grow fast in the embrace of big corporate muscle.

In Finland, large companies should be doing a lot more business with startups. They should create scalable processes for how they could support smaller companies to be a partner of their growth strategy.

The word “disrupt” is overused among startups, but it does have a good point. When combining disruption with digitalisation, the potential of different startup ventures seems endless.

Just think about the impact of Hotels.com, Airbnb and Priceline.com on the hotel industry. The first instinct of a big company is to laugh at new ventures, then comes skepticism, fear and finally a forced cooperation when there is no other option for the large company (almost every hotel uses a Hotels.com-type service these days).

What if the first reaction would be interest towards new business opportunities…

In my own experience, we grew our tiny e-commerce site into Finland’s largest online marketplace for renovation projects. We did this with the cooperation of a publicly traded company, Alma Media. We have our startup mindset in everything what we do boosted by the marketing power of a media empire.

So, if you are an executive director in some big company, please take a moment to think whether your company could cooperate more with small startups. Not because it is good PR, but because it has a lot of business potential.