- September 13 2021
- 5 mins
Corporate Innovation Centres
Startups need three elements to succeed: Strategy, growth and fundraise. These elements are further segmented into their desire to learn about technology, investor relations, product management, sales, marketing and people strategy. Overall, a startup has to get all the support that can make it a large enterprise.
The success of startups can be expedited with support from corporate innovation centers. India is amongst the top 5 locations for innovation centers in the world. India’s innovation centers have leapfrogged to be in the top five globally, working on innovation and futuristic solutions.
For corporates worldwide, India has been rising as one of the favorite destinations to develop and nurture corporate innovation centers. With a list led by Silicon Valley, London, Paris, and Singapore, now Bengaluru and Hyderabad are close to supporting the future of tech and startup ecosystems. Of these, companies like Cisco and Xiaomi also have venture funds to back startups that align with these conglomerates’ corporate strategy. The corporate innovation centers in India top brands like Apple, Airbus, Visa, CISCO, PB, Microsoft, Phillips, and a few.
One of the successful corporate innovation centers is Airbus’ Bizlab. They intend to bring together startups and their intrapreneurs, while Visa claims to consider having 2,000 developers who will work on next-generation payment solutions as a part of their innovation center. Around the world, the financial services industry leads the opening of innovation centers. As per the research reports, the financial sector constituted 24 percent of the newly opened innovation centers, ahead of 21 percent from electronics and IT and 16 percent from the manufacturing industry.
Also, a couple of years ago, studies showed that 55 percent of the innovation centers globally operate as startup accelerators, while 33 percent of them are in-house innovation labs. Here is a summary of a few of the large enterprise innovation centers:
- HP Inc. Innovation Lab Name: HP Labs: HP Labs is a research facility that focuses on technologies like 3D printing, microfluidics and imaging, endpoint security, and digital manufacturing.
- Alphabet Innovation Lab Name: X Founded: 2010
- Created in 2010 to work on “moonshots” that “aim to make the world a radically better place” — Google X became X in 2015, a separate division within Alphabet, the parent company of Google. X is the innovation lab where some of Alphabet’s most significant projects happen, such as graduated projects Google Glass and self-driving car company Waymo.
- Microsoft Innovation Lab Name: Microsoft Research Lab Founded: 1991
- Microsoft has numerous labs, each focused on applying research independent of product development cycles. Projects include accelerating large-scale model inference and training, refining accessibility to build more inclusive technologies, and more.
- TCS Innovation Lab Name: TCS Innovation Labs Founded: 1981
- TCS’ wide-spanning network of technology, domain, and academic alliance labs lets IT experts of all stripes create new systems. Research areas range from deep learning & AI to media, entertainment, & advertising.
- Philips Innovation Lab Name: Philips Design
- Design is at the core of many high-tech companies and innovation labs alike. Philips Design focuses on new ideas and new technologies to improve the lives of its customers. This lab gives its innovators, who come from a wide array of disciplines, the freedom to explore and find new solutions.
Corporate innovation is critical for enterprises to contact the entrepreneurial ecosystems and stay relevant in the face of disruption. While the pandemic has caused many organizations to go slow on the cost of innovation efforts, many others have fast-tracked it. Sometimes corporate innovation centers don’t yield what is expected; however, the economy changes at breakneck speed when they get it right.
