Company Profile
Borusan Makina ve Güç Sistemleri provides end-to-end solutions to different industries like construction, mining, food, and energy.
With the Caterpillar strategic partnership in 1994, Borusan Makina ve Güç Sistemleri, now delivers end-to-end solutions in international markets including Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Far East Russia as well as Turkey.
Challenge
Borusan Makina’s main challenge was to update its service and product range with the changing needs and opportunities for its customers in different industries spread over a wide geography and wanted to test a stakeholder strategy with startups and technology firms for this purpose.
The goal was to gather insight into what new technology-based value offers can be co-created with startups or R&D companies and the feasibility around them.
Approach
Our approach was to start by analyzing how and why Borusan Makina's global competitors engage with R&D companies and startups.
As a next step, we prioritized the list of analyzed competitor approaches, according to compatibility with Borusan Makina targets and return on investment (ROI) expectations.
Finally, we designed the engagement methodology of Borusan Makine with startups and R&D companies and started testing it in the first year.
The approach was carried out in 2 phases.
Phase 1 – Scope Development
- Analyze Borusan Makina’s corporate innovation strategy documents
- Global benchmark research and reporting – Best practices from the global competition were analyzed according to their engagement strategy with external talent like startups and R&D companies.
- Conducting workshops focused on gathering opportunities and pain points from business units
- Creating a long list of opportunities, derived from the workshops with business units, and synthesized with global benchmark studies. The opportunity pool was later prioritized according to Borusan Makina corporate innovation strategy, technology readiness levels of solutions, and ROI expectations
Phase 2 – Design and execution of Borusan Makina startup engagement methodology
Key Tasks & Milestones
After the first prioritization sprint, 10 innovation focus areas were determined. Later on, these 10 focus areas were planned to be tackled in 3 different horizons.
In the first cycle, the solutions for the following 12 different technology clusters were scouted with the digital platform and other collaborations.
- Wearables
- Remote service and personnel training
- Building information modeling - BIM
- Acoustic and kinetic sensor
- Digital twins
- Predictive maintenance
- Image processing
- Drones
- Construction project management
- Construction industry material supply marketplaces
- Remote device management
- Artificial intelligence - forecasting - planning
115 startups were analyzed by the Workinlot team. The findings were shared with Borusan Makina innovation team and deep dive meetings were held with 8 startups. A confidentiality agreement (NDA) was shared with 5 startups to provide sensitive details on the co-creation case. Later, requested the unique value proposition of the R&D startup for the detailed case presented by Borusan.
In the first year, a contractual process was initiated to carry out a proof of concept (PoC) with 2 teams. The contracting process with the R&D startup was completed. The initiated PoC ended successfully.
Outcomes
The startup engagement methodology designed for Borusan has been tested in multiple focus areas and found compatible with the corporate processes.
The creative dynamics of startup engagement motivated and onboarded new talent for Borusan; boosting employee retention.
Motivated by a successful PoC, Borusan further committed to the open innovation process by identifying additional focus areas.
In a different focus area where the PoC process was on the way, Borusan decided to invest in infrastructure in order to better utilize the know-how transfer from the PoC candidate startup. Leading to an even more meaningful gain for the company. A unique data-sharing infrastructure allows interdepartmental data collection and analysis.
Borusan Makina achieved measurable results in the first year of testing its stakeholder strategy with startups and R&D companies. In order to better utilize the stakeholder strategy, new focus areas and financial instruments like a CVC (Corporate Venture Capital) were introduced.