Cover photo by Andrea Piacquadio
Businesses can cultivate innovations through carefully measured risk-taking.
Startup partnerships offer one approach to innovation development.(How PoCs Help Businesses Unlock Startup Potential)
For effective collaboration between distinct organizations, project management must be both measurable and properly documented.
We've been designing and managing PoC projects and tracking the data produced by corporations and startups during their Proof-of-Concept (PoC) processes.
Below is a sample PoC tracking screenshot with anonymized information from a 2021 PoC report we submitted to a corporation.
The example above is a report extracted from the PoC tracking tool.
Green boxes represent completed tasks within the current Proof-of-Concept (PoC) cycle and white boxes show the steps not finished yet.
Each green box contains documents and different records of the process.
Recording this data in detail initially allowed us to illustrate to both the startup and corporation our position within the PoC cycle. As PoCs became more numerous, we developed better capabilities for gathering and analyzing data regarding the corporation's startup engagements.
While developing the PoC tracking tool, we realized that we could create value for organizations in three areas.
- Developing new product-service collaborations with startups, identifying corporate innovation bottlenecks (5 Ways To Break Through Innovation Bottlenecks)
- Conducting and reporting PoC projects supporting in-house venture development
- Investment evaluation for corporate venture capitals that value analyzing startup PoC outcomes
Today, we can go back 3 years and access project records, each step, problems that occurred, and what the conditions and outputs were.
Although staff or needs may change in organizations, the capability to analyze past experiences today is immensely valuable. Simultaneously, it offers a substantial opportunity to strengthen competitive intelligence. (Harness Corporate Memory and Collective Intelligence for productivity)
A PoC project can generate insights about the company, market, and technology even when it fails to deliver expected results. In these tests of new technologies or business models, organizations sometimes discover either that the need was incorrectly defined or that the solution's value proposition is insufficient.
Establishing test requirements and success metrics upfront, before beginning the PoC, facilitates accurate assessment of the learnings.
Communicating outcomes through measurable metrics and monitoring the process with data makes the company's innovation risk both measurable and manageable.
Workinlot and PoC Management
Different support mechanisms exist for companies and startups looking to innovate through technology.
Our specific focus is on validating the new concepts with PoC projects.
This includes defining PoC scenarios, selecting meaningful metrics for both parties that align with these scenarios, and managing projects end-to-end while providing objective metric interpretation. To enable this process, we developed a simple PoC tracking tool.
Examining the data from this tool revealed our ability to create highly strategic value for corporations.
Every successful partnership requires shared gains for both sides. Startups capable of executing PoCs and learning what product they need to build throughout the process came out ahead (The B2B Startup Commercialization Challenges and Tips)
For startups targeting corporate customers, PoC serves as a kind of pilot vessel. The corporation, meanwhile, is often a heavy tanker.
For this reason, we suggest validating value through PoC quickly and with minimal investment. (Fast track to product 1.0 and product market fit via effective PoC projects)
PoC projects that are extended, costly, and without measured outcomes can cause both companies and startups to lose direction on the open waters.
Monitoring PoC data decreases partnership risks for corporations while providing startups an avenue from solution validation to market achievement.
Workinlot supports companies in discovering innovation opportunities and managing their technology startup partnerships.
Let's connect to identify collaboration opportunities.
