A Global Fortune 500 Telecom company leveraged the global start-up ecosystem through a co-innovation strategy

Client’s challenge

The client in the picture is a USA headquartered, global Fortune-500 Telecom major, who was focused on research and experimentation. To increase the pace of experimentation and reduce time-to-market, the India center was keen to leverage global start-up ecosystem with an intent to build commercial partnerships via co-innovation, license and/or vendor agreement.

The client needed Zinnov to step in to –

• Design process for identifying use-cases, shortlisting and curating start-ups and defining process for PoCs.
• Support in-house team with strategic and tactical insights for onboarding internal stakeholders and enabling seamless execution.
• Provide customized support to each of the 8 portfolio teams within the company – ranging from security, enterprise IT, consumer, facilities, and GRE.

How Zinnov helped

Zinnov developed a systematic approach to help the client which included scanning the problem statement and curating the solution steps, connecting with the different stakeholders, and understanding what is required to de-risk the company. Zinnov scanned all the relevant start-ups and then curated these start-ups to on-board for the client. We then enabled seamless communication between the parties involved. Furthermore, to de-risk the scope, collected feedback from the clients at each step of the process.

Impact created

• 7 POCs created with 1 completed POC, 2 in-progress POCs, and 4 POCs on which work will begin soon
• With this, a dedicated POC fund was set up to be used for further development of this project
• An internal process has also been set that will help the company undertake further discussions with the stakeholders in the future