Background

The 12^th Sweden India Nobel Memorial CEO Round table Meeting will be hosted by the Swedish Ambassador to India Klas Molin on 14^th December 2018. It is the highlight of the annual Sweden-India Nobel Memorial program which is an integrated event to promote Sweden, under the overarching theme of excellence in science and innovation.

Theme | Unleashing the Power of Corporate + Startup collaboration

Open Innovation, whether through corporate venture capital, scouting missions, hackathons or excubators, to name just some examples is not a new practice. However, due to the explosion of technology in the past two decades, there has been a spike in firms starting and expanding their corporate venturing units to keep pace with the evolution of technology and its ubiquitous adoption across industries. Many companies in Sweden and in India have already understood the potential of these cooperation and have made strategic decisions to integrate startups into their growth and innovation strategies. Most of these current initiatives are still in the early stages and are experiencing a learning curve. There is no silver bullet, each organization has its own goals and challenges, and will therefore need to find a cooperation model that suits them. There are, however, generic lessons to be learned.

Current state of play

India is quickly becoming a leading global startup hub. There are around 20,000 startups in India; around 4,750 of these are technology led startups. Out of these, 1,400 new tech startups were born in 2016 alone; implying there are 3-4 tech startups being born every day. As per a survey report by Innoven Capital (survey of 140 founders); leading factors that make India appealing as a startup nation are

• Cost of doing business
• Proximity to customers/vendors
• Size of domestic market

Around seven million college graduates per year in India; 55% of the youth prefer working in startups over corporates (as per a youth of the nation survey of 150K young Indians). Second largest consumer internet market in the world (overtaking China) with 462 million internet users, 80% of these users are mobile based.

Rising numbers of entrepreneurs, incubators, international and local VCs, and multinational corporations are turbocharging the development of a burgeoning tech scene. The Indian government is investing heavily to grow domestic start-up ecosystem and hopefully this will lead to more positive partnerships between Swedish corporates and Indian startups.

Indian startups are addressing local problems through creative technologies and solutions. For Swedish industry in India, the prospect of working with such startups is appealing - but also challenging. There are different options available for corporates to partner with startups at various stages in their innovation journey: idea stage (hackathons, business plan competitions), launch stage (co-working spaces, incubators, mentorship networks, corporate funding) and growth stage (accelerators, go-to-market). For corporates to offer disruptive solutions, they must first define the business problem and partner with or acquihire startups that provide robust solutions. Startups can help corporates increase their innovation quotient while also finding new avenues of customer development and go-to-market scale.

The Indian Government has committed to building a New India by boosting the innovation ecosystem and supporting budding entrepreneurs. In this regard, an initiative focussed on Accelerating Growth for New India Innovations has been launched that aspires to aid, assist and transform ingenious solutions, products and technologies into commercially viable products. Under the leadership of the Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India and the Cabinet Secretary of India, Invest India will be implementing this program.

To have an efficient communication with, and build trusted links, to Indian startup hubs,government authorities and investor networks, working with concrete projects within a joint format is advantageous. The UNNATI way is one methodology to address social needs through open innovation challenges. In the spirit of the India Sweden Joint Declaration on Innovation Partnership for a Sustainable Future, Business Sweden together with industry partners are engaging the Indian startup ecosystem to address social needs through open innovation challenges “The UNNATI way”.

The discussion:

The 12^th Sweden India Nobel Memorial CEO Round table will create a platform for dialogue between Swedish and Indian industrial leaders on visions and best practices corporate-startup collaboration. The diverse experiences harbored by the group of invited Indian and Swedish leaders can be utilised to surface constructive ideas that will create win-win-win propositions for corporate, startup and consumer. Questions that may be discussed:

What strategies have been successful for large corporates to harness the power of startup innovation?

• And how can startups take advantage of partnering with large corporates?
• How can we make those two worlds talk to each other more and in mutually beneficial ways?
• What can we learn from the startup networks that are emerging in India?
• What does it take to become a great first customer to a start-up?
• How do you eliminate obstacles and create the right conditions for collaboration between big Swedish companies in India and Indian start-ups and innovators?
• How can big Swedish firms based in India can partner with Indian government and policymakers to set up joint innovation challenges and hackathons?
• How to navigate the challenge of managing Intellectual Property Rights and the ambition of open innovation in the Indian landscape?

Expected outcome: This 12^th Sweden India Nobel Memorial CEO roundtable, therefore, shall include the key stakeholders in this industry, such as leaders from the union government / policy makers, CEO’s and industry leaders, startups, key players from the entrepreneurship promotion and innovative thought leaders. The key objective is to look at success stories and replicate them. To share and learn from each other the innovative methods and the challenges that surround them. To understand the on-ground expectations, needs and challenges, and to jointly address and resolve them in the best possible ways, providing a “to-do agenda” for policy makers and corporates.