We’re living and operating in a very complex world. For companies of all shapes and sizes to meet customer needs, they must constantly innovate. Finding strong, external collaborators is just one of the ways companies like Hexagon can accelerate progress.
As a collaborator, we have a lot to offer younger innovative companies seeking scale – and they us. At Hexagon we are privileged enough to have a suite of cutting-edge technology, teams with some of the brightest minds in the business and the resources we need to invest in R&D. As much newer companies, start-ups tend to be more agile, passionate and motivated by their great ideas. That makes them a pretty good match for us.
That’s why we’ve launched Sixth Sense – to create a structure or framework for these collaborations. But who do we choose to work with and why? There are definitely a few things that we like to see when deciding who to work with.
Expertise
One thing we’re often quite impressed with, especially in the current cohort, is the deep segment expertise. Each of the participants has strong knowledge – beyond simply PhD level – which makes them extremely unique.
For example, Smart PM has a close connection to precision mechanics company Egile, which means they really understand how to make parts and how to automate processes. Meanwhile IconPro, while being very closely connected to RWTH Aachen University, was involved in lots of consulting through their machine tool lab, which gave the team lots of real-world experience.
Scalability
Beyond expertise, scalability is a huge consideration for us. Our goal is to eventually scale these solutions and so we are looking for the ingredients which will help a product or service to find scale easily. For example something like Uber requires lots of drivers to sign up to find scale, we’re looking for companies that can grow their customer base without needing lots of additional resources, such as a human workforce.
Team
For anyone, be it VC or corporate collaborator, the team itself is very important. Firstly you want to see approachability. When you’re working with someone there needs to be an element of flexibility. We each need to come to a relationship with a view to learning from each other. This is sometimes not as strong in the more ego-driven founders.
Then there needs to be a sense of reality. Of course we need big ideas but not heads in the clouds. Founders need to have a realistic idea of what they’re trying to achieve and what we can achieve together. This is not transactional, we both need to put work in and as Hexagon, we aren’t here to swoop in and save the day.
Then of course there is an aspect of tolerance and a bit of accommodating each other. We are running this programme for the first time and we need to work together with the cohort to make sure we get it right and tweak along the way.
Lastly, we like to see diversity. Not just of products and services but of mindsets coming in. We each need to be able to see customer challenges in different ways – a fresh perspective is very powerful. Lots of big companies work within siloes structures but the ability to invite outside points of view is essential.
Mindset
Overall, I think we want start-ups to approach us with an open mind. Open to new ideas. Open to learning. Open to building a community – we don’t want to create one time only interactions, we’re trying to build an ecosystem of alumni that can accelerate each other’s progress and success. It’s exciting to imagine what we can all achieve together.