Corporate dating takes to online matchmaking

The dating game between corporates and innovative entrepreneurs has long resembled a style of courtship from the pages of 19th century writer Jane Austen – the sales equivalent of 300 pages of tortuous dialogue, with the poor innovators constantly feeling they will be left for a more attractive mate by the wealthy but overly busy suitor.

This dating world has become freer and easier with the rise of open innovation and corporate venturing, with corporates and innovators finding it easier to develop areas of mutual interest, through experimental business partner- ships or chance investments.

Yet this dating game for many is arguably still too inefficient and random. Many executives still prefer the romance of a chance meeting at a business lunch or conference to do business over a glass of champagne. Yet this courtship ritual is also evolving, and innovators who might be more interesting long-term partners for corporates are also able to get their point across in the less showy but often more objective format of the internet.

For this reason Global Corporate Venturing is partnering New York Stock Exchange on the NYSE Corporate Connections programme. This programme is looking for our readership to recommend their portfolio companies for the system, which has already signed up 15 corporates including the New York Stock Exchange, as well as multinational businesses American Airlines, BASF, Cisco, Coca-Cola, Dun & Bradstreet, General Electric, Intuit, Jones Lang LaSalle, TD Ameritrade and Walmart, and is looking to expand this further.

Roger London, whose TechMatch software lies under the Corporations Connections matchmaking programme, says there have been 500 start-up submissions, 300 or so reviews, and there have been eight or 10 matches. According to London, a match is where: “A corporate partner likes preliminary information, digs a little deeper in more detailed materials and if their interest grows they want to have direct contact. You know, this is someone they want to talk to – have a date, to continue the match- making metaphor.”

London explained how Corporate Connections had come about. “In early 2012 the New York Stock Exchange decided they wanted to provide additional benefits to com- panies on the exchange, to be a resource of innovative tech to use in their business either on the product side or within their enterprise to make them more efficient, improve performance, provide additional customer value and so on. Depending on their business, corporate partners are interested in anything from cyber to clean-tech to medical devices.

“But almost every corporate partner is interested in keeping their networks safe, improving customer expe- riences, more secure facilities, lowering the fleet fuel or building costs, reducing manufacturing costs and so on, which could mean technologies such as data mining and analytics, mobile platforms and apps, cloud computing and knowledge management.”

NYSE started with StartUp America to promote the opportunity to their innovative members. StartUp America represents a strong pool of earlier-stage entrepreneurs. Now London and NYSE are seeking additional variety in the “dating pool” and are turning to investor-backed ventures. 

London said: “Global Corporate Venturing has one of the largest corporate venture capital communities on the planet and are a terrific partner to help make corporate investors aware of a great opportunity for their portfolio companies.”

London added: “The benefit for portfolio companies is they can start to build a relationship with a public company they might never have developed on their own, or might otherwise have taken months or even years. Similarly for the corporate partners, this is dealflow they may not have seen and the intelligent matching system helps them triage through pretenders to find contenders to license the tech- nology, contract to deploy in the public company’s enter- prise, invest in, embed in product line, acquire or other strategic relationship”

Global Corporate Venturing’s editor-in-chief, James Mawson, added: “We see this as a win-win for our corporate venturing community. Portfolio companies that are not strategic have everything to gain by their submission. It takes roughly an hour and within minutes they can see if they have one, two, five or more qualified matches with NYSE corporate partners. From the corporate venturers’ perspective, their portfolio companies can get tremendous visibility into large companies which are difficult to achieve.