Interest grows in startup partnering

However, attempts to run a startup within an enterprise aren’t always successful, industry observers noted. For enterprises that don’t wish to follow that track, the next best thing is to partner with tech-driven early-stage companies. CIOs and other corporate executives with an innovation mandate are looking to startups for an edge.

“It’s increasingly common for CIOs and … CTOs to look at ways to partner with the startup community, often in conjunction with venture capital firms or accelerators,” said Nigel Fenwick, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research.

Nigel Fenwick

He said the interest in early-stage companies stems from a recognition among enterprises that they need to be more agile than in the past and that building an in-house startup to acquire that agility is a difficult task.

The idea, he said, is to “nurture a startup as a way to getting access to technology without the barriers that you typically find if putting an [in-house] innovation program together,” Fenwick explained.

Fenwick said one of the roles of Forrester’s own chief business technology officer is to bring local startups into the organization and have them demonstrate their technologies. He said C-level executives, in general, are showing greater interest in startup activity. He points to higher C-suite attendance at the CES conference as an example. He noted that CES evolved into more of a technology show than a consumer electronics expo, but still believes the arrival of top executives is a telling trend.

“There’s a recognition that executives need to keep a finger on the pulse of what is happening in the emerging technology ecosystem and figure out how to apply that in their businesses,” he said. 

At ORU, keeping tabs on startups and emerging technologies helps mitigate the risk of working with early-stage companies.

“We will risk 10% of our investment in IT on startups,” Mathews said. “So, in order to risk 10%, we are always keeping up with what’s the latest thing.”

The university’s interest encompasses such fields as AR/VR, educational technology and cloud computing. In the latter category, ORU works with N2N Services Inc., an Atlanta startup that offers an integration-platform-as-a-service offering for the higher education sector.

Mathews said N2N offers the ability to integrate in the cloud ORU’s ERP system, learning management system, CRM system and time clock system. N2N also addresses the issue of undocumented scripts and APIs that can proliferate in an organization.

“N2N takes all those scripts and APIs and puts them in a cloud library,” Mathews said, noting ORU has at least 500 such items in N2N’s repository. “I will rest assured, as a CIO, we have a record for each one.”

Mathews said he’s now looking for startups that understand where the university is going with mixed reality — inexpensive VR glasses that clip on a smartphone versus VR goggles such as Oculus Rift — and can further extend ORU’s EON platform into the education field.