Some thoughts & further reading to follow up on your questions

It was good to join the call with you yesterday morning - your Sustainability Challenge is clearly an exciting project.

I thought you and your team asked some interesting questions. I wanted to point you to the following page of resources, which I think tackle many of the challenges that you are considering. I hope they can be of some use for you and your team!

Best wishes,
Sam
samuel@rainmaking.io

1| We're focusing on energy, water and waste - which may not be considered too exciting for participants. How do we get employees to engage with these topics?

2| How can we work on the project effectively through virtual means, given the constraints of covid19?

3| What is a good process of filtering participants prior to training?

4| We know from experience that sometimes startups seem good on the surface, but once you get into more detail and there are greater demands on them, you start to see that they are not mature enough or developed enough to offer what we need to deliver real impact. How can you ensure that the companies are appropriate and sufficiently competent and corporate ready to work with us?

5| How can we attract global startups and attract the most innovative solutions? What is an attractive 'prize' that would make them want to be a part of this?

Questions from Lorraine:

QUESTION 1| We're focusing on energy, water and waste - which may not be considered too exciting for participants. How do we get employees to engage with these topics?

I think there are 3 key sentiments to play on:

(1) - The potential for positive societal impact for each of these topics is enormous. Solving challenges in energy, water and waste is perfectly aligned with the UN SDGs and so gives participants an opportunity to work on projects that contribute to better outcomes for society and the planet. The topics themselves should not be the key focus - rather the key focus should be the impact that can be delivered to people and to the planet by leveraging new business models (exciting) and technology (exciting) to tackle the key themes.

We have ideated and built new ventures with teams from Ramboll (see here) focusing on air quality, mining/geoanalytics, climate change adaptation & financial risk. The topics are similar to your own in terms of not being so exciting, but the enthusiasm among the participants has been very strong because the key positioning is that we are working to solve issues with enormous impact for the planet and our future.

We have done ideation and created new ventures with Engie (see here) in similar 'non-exciting' areas - eg. energy efficiency, renewable energy (solar), smart buildings, buildings analytics, mobility - and we have had amazing interest and excitement in the projects because of the impact to society and in supporting transformation in terms of sustainability.

Here are some more examples of corporate venture projects where it is the potential societal impact that has inspired such strong engagement.

(2) - Make the topics more relevant and relatable to participants. Eg. 'water', 'energy' and 'waste' may not seem so relatable, but effective water distribution, dynamic demand of energy and disposal of waste are all key elements of smart home infrastructure and applications. 'Smart home' is something that is very relevant and consumer-friendly in the daily lives of employees.

We ran an internal ideation and venture development programme with Keppel Group last year (details here) where we focused on new ideas in smart buildings, energy efficiency, ocean waste, etc. Things like smart homes and clean seas were very inspiring for the teams.

(3) - Rather than focusing on the themes, focus on the process, which is:

ideating new venture opportunities,
iterating business models,
working like a startup,
building a new entrepreneurial skillset,
working with emerging technologies,
delivering innovative solutions.

That can be very exciting for people, and a great way to work in new ways on inspiring projects. It's not just about the topics, it's about the ways of working with those topics to bring new solutions to market. Ie. working like an entrepreneur.

QUESTION 2| How can we work on the project effectively through virtual means, given the constraints of covid19?

It's a good question and like I said on our call yesterday, my personal belief is that some things are better done in real life (like implementing physical hardware needed for example in smart buildings management; or understanding the key user behaviours / physical routines of customers that you are building a product for), and some things are actually better when done through virtual means (like collaborative ideation, data synthesis, experiment design).

The key thing about working virtually that can lead to improvements is the asynchronicity. Because people are now able to work on the same things at different times and on different timelines, they can take more time where they need, think more deeply on key topics or generating ideas, and revisit the same thing multiple times to make changes and iterations.

We are currently building 2 new companies from scratch (in the areas of smart home and renewable energy) and none of the team members have met each other - they have all been working virtually from the start of the project. We also have a pilot running in an industrial facility in Thailand, where we are working with a French startup and the whole thing has been set up and implemented virtually, without either Rainmaking or the French startup ever going to the facility in Thailand. This pilot is generating thousands of dollars in savings for our corporate partner in Thailand, and potentially will become a new revenue stream that they can sell to their customers in a few months. So it's definitely possible!

If it can be useful for you, then the collaboration tools that we use in Rainmaking are:

Miro, Mural & Google Jamboard - for workshops, design sprints, ideation, etc.
Zoom - for meetings, workshops, breakout rooms, networking
Google Docs & Google Slides - for asynchronous collaboration
Slack - for messaging & project team communications
Asana - for project & workstream management
Loom - for sharing comments & thoughts alongside content onscreen, as videos that can be viewed asynchronously

In Rainmaking, we are 22 Partners and Associate Partners that make up the leadership team globally, spread across offices from Mexico to Australia. Given the effect of covid-19 on our different offices and work around the world, we have recently run a strategic positioning and new business line creation workstream to make sure we are capturing all available opportunities and building new business out of this crisis. That work was done entirely remotely across our many teams, and has already brought to market 2 new business lines. It was all achieved through entirely virtual customer development, ideation, prototyping and iteration. We used the tools mentioned above to do all of this - so it can be done!

Useful resource: Here is a really great guide to working remotely/virtually on design sprints, workshops and facilitated sessions by the American company Voltage Control, which specialises in this type of work.

Useful resource: The company that makes Wordpress (the website builder) is called Automaticc. It's a company that has always been decentralised (ie. no central office), from the day it first started. They have been very successful this way.

This article is by their founder (Matt Mullenweg) and explains why working remotely can be so effective because of the asynchronocity.

Distributed Work’s Five Levels of Autonomy

Here is another take on the same topic.

And here is a great, detailed account of effectively running remote meetings and collaboration sessions written by a friend of mine.

QUESTION 3| What is a good process of filtering participants prior to training?

An approach that worked well when we did this with Keppel was to pre-assess potential participants prior to making selection of the group of employees that would join for the programme.

We announced the programme, accepted registrations/signups from employees, and then had all of them do initial exercises virtually, using our Digital Learning Platform. Through the platform, we hosted a series of content and training modules, which participants needed to work through. As they worked through them, they started to do some 'pre-work' relating to their idea. We could then factor in their participation and the quality of their output into how we selected participants for the programme proper.

Taking this approach meant 3 things:

(1) we could better assess which people were more likely to deliver high quality outputs and do well in the main programme

(2) we could initiate the participants in some of the key tools and frameworks that they would need to apply during the challenge itself, and let them experience the ways of working that would be applied during the programme

(3) we could involve a greater number of people at the start of the programme, even if not all of them moved forward to validate and develop their ideas

Home

https://learning.rainmaking.io/

Question from Hwee Lim:

QUESTION 4| We know from experience that sometimes startups seem good on the surface, but once you get into more detail and there are greater demands on them, you start to see that they are not mature enough or developed enough to offer what we need to deliver real impact. How can you ensure that the companies are appropriate and sufficiently competent and corporate ready to work with us?

Great question, I'm glad you're asking it! I think it's really important that as part of your selection process you are making sure to work with startups that are sufficiently mature and have sufficient experience working with companies of your size.

We have run more than 100 commercial pilots between corporates and startups. We do it so much better now than we did at the start, and that's because we have learned so much through all of our experiences (good and bad). Now we firmly believe that the following 3 things are the biggest drivers as to whether or not they succeed:

Strategic alignment: corporate assets to work with, and engaged sponsors (both financial & operational)
Deep due diligence: focus on competent, credible, corporate-ready startups that have validated problems, validated solutions, validated business models and that are ready to scale
Smart pilot structuring: short, structured, experiment-led pilots that use the lean startup methodology of prioritizing and validating the biggest risks

I think have a look at slides 13-15 and 22-26 in this deck for some useful tips on this.

Also, an article here that may be useful in terms of what type of startups to avoid.

Question from Zaana:

QUESTION 5| How can we attract global startups and attract the most innovative solutions? What is an attractive 'prize' that would make them want to be a part of this?

To attract the type of startups that Hwee Lim mentions above, the key is to create commercially interesting opportunities for growth-stage startups. Once you have done strong diligence, for the most innovative and most appropriate startups, you will need to run your own ‘sales-process’ - ie. to convince them as to why they should work with you.

Here is a good primer on what startups want from their corporate collaborators.

Please also see this slide:

I hope these materials can be useful for you! By all means feel free to subscribe to this page (top right of the screen) for more materials.

There are some more general resources about working with startups and on internal ideation and venture development programmes.

By all means give me a shout if you have any questions - always happy to help.

Some thoughts & further reading to follow up on your questions

General resources on corporate-startup collaboration

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