Corporate innovation and startup scouting is a process that requires both tools and methodology. Depending on the use case you’re working on, you would need fast results to browse through by yourself, or a deeper scouting campaign to ensure that candidates truly match your requirements.
With Novable, you can now do both under one roof.
Our clients appreciate the smart combination of AI-powered technologies and human expertise that delivers top-fitting results within two days, saving them time down the road as we guarantee that all of them will fall into their briefing scope to reach the corporate innovation.
A DeepMatching™ Campaign is appropriate for project-based, specific needs, when you know what you’re looking for and can create a clear and accurate breakdown of your requirements. They go beyond mere explorations and retrieve a curated list of startup candidates sorted by their relevance (read: by their semantic proximity with your expressed needs). The Novable technology embraces the entire contextual information we have on startups to calculate a proximity score between your demands and their offerings.
A demo example of a Golden Basket
Benefits are obvious: by delegating the tedious filter-and-match steps to the AI, and the validation process to our Agents, you only get the cream of the crop, and you can start your due diligence process right away, two days after submitting your Campaign.
The ranked list of qualified results is called a Golden Basket. No leaded eggs here, just nuggets. Each startup profile is displayed in your platform account in a way that allows you to decide in a snapshot if it’s a match – or a miss. Giving feedback on results (tagging) feeds and trains both the algorithm and your Agent and improves further deliveries.
All this in two days. However, in other situations, you might need something even faster. This is when the Real-time Search enters the game.
Our extensive experience of working with corporate innovation-related professionals taught us that startup scouting is a 2-dimension process made of different use cases, and several scouting steps.
The Startup Scouting Value Chain (Novable, 2022)
When it comes to startup scouting, and more generally to open corporate innovation, every case is different, depending on the corporate culture, internal processes, teams in place, allocated resources and budget – and even the executive’s personality. Therefore, an efficient scouting technology and associated service must encompass the full spectrum of use cases and situations.
The first steps of a startup scouting process require a well-defined strategy and an alignment of all stakeholders involved. This is often a root cause of slowing down, if not inertia. Methodologies and tools exist to tackle these challenges (have a look at our partner Bloomflow). On top of that, the very next step is also a time-consuming exercise: exploring markets, landscaping ecosystems, mapping out a first innovation layer – all activities mobilising time and resources that extend the whole process duration. The momentum has passed, and an innovation fatigue sets in. In a word: speed is key.
Novable’s Real-time Search answers those challenges and risks by providing instant results from a set of topics submitted to the platform. It runs an in-depth search in the entire Novable database with a broader internal reach. The whole startup activity context is taken into account: company firmographics and website content (and soon other data points such as social feeds, patents, mentions in the news and other contextual sources).
Our clients use the Real-time Search for multiple purposes: map an innovation topic instantly, conduct background checks, reveal competition intensity, run market research, prepare business cases, feed strategy formulations, identify a startup upon a simple need, etc.
Real-time Search in the Novable platform
Now the question is: why can’t I just run the same search in Google or in a startup database? Fair point. You’ll always find something with search engines. However, Google will render results from the entire web, while Novable focuses on innovative companies. Good luck with removing from your mental load all results that are not startups. With startup databases, your search will retrieve correspondences from the tweet-long short descriptions declaratively submitted by startups themselves, while Novable gathers a wide contextual data range.
But, don’t take my word for it. Let’s run a comparative test.
Let’s say you are looking for innovative companies offering hardware and software training solutions using AR and VR in the therapeutic treatment area.
We’ll use the following string of topics in Google:
We add the keyword “startup” to tell Google that we’re looking for startups (no need to add it in Novable of course).
Here’s what Google is giving us:
Luckily, we don’t get 5 first Google Ads results (there are 3 at the bottom of the first page though). On the first result page, not a single startup appears. You are proposed with paying studies, corporate blogs or specialised online press. First companies proposing something close to what we’re looking for appear at the middle of page 2.
The same search in Crunchbase renders this. No comment.
With Novable’s Real-time Search, we have the following results (green checks are our addition).
50% of the first 16 results fall in the search scope perfectly (it even spotted a Metaverse-based VR training for medical students).
Google is super-useful, we all use it every day, for anything. Startup databases also come in very handy when you need some financial information about a company you already know. But when it comes to efficient scouting, more adapted and optimised tools do a much better, much faster job. With the Real-time Search, Novable now brings all use cases under one roof.
Let us know about your thoughts on the topic on our LinkedIn post!
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