Jab (When) GCC met Startup

06-May-2020: Yet another day in Covid world but Giant Leap for GCC Veda . Historic ! , we brought together the two worlds ; GCC - with its array of resources and experience at disposal , looking for delivering more value and Startups - the ones tinkering with new technologies, and hunger to grow more, limited by sometimes resources to scale up and get discovered.

Just to visualize us how these two sectors are shaping up India in world market

The next obvious Questions therefore is can these two sectors learn from each other ? add value to each other ? As an exercise, we did a small survey and polled GCC leaders and the verdict was resounding YES.

We are extremely thankful to have got the august panelist of GCC Leaders : Pritam who brings with himself an experience of CPG industry been with industry leaders like Unilever and now at AbinBev, Anjani, an alumn of NIT Rourkela and Indiana , who has donned many leadership hats including CDO, CIO at Automotive, IT Companies and now at Pharma major Strides ; and Rahul, who is a seasoned IT and infra leader across IT Companies and GCC like Bosch, Honeywell, GE and now Garett

We collected the views from GCC leaders on

1. What lies ahead of GIC/GCC , what are the trends being observed . Will India's frugal engineering see more opportunities for GCC ? Are we already observing a shift of outsourcing from IT companies to the GCC players

2. The respective industries, more so in context of pandemic that has gripped us . We got interesting views - example how Covid has accelerated, and therefore digitized, the process at Pharma companies, from formulation to commercialization OR how leading beverages company like AbinBev are picking up clues from e-commerce and shifting channels from B2B2C to B2C (Therefore more Digital push) OR how with Covid, the manufacturing hub centered in China needs a re-look with some examples

3. Indian Startups - what would they like to see more from startups; what would they like to avoid

4. Experiences in collaborating with startups. It was a learning to know the various accelerator programs, the incubation houses like DNA from Bosch; 100+ Accelerator Program

5. Recommendations on engagement and operating models

We also had an array of experience from founders at startups across Service lines like IIoT,

industries like Healthcare and tools like Collaborations / Online Events . Honored to have

Avnish, an alumn from NIT -D, and university of Melbourne , who has brought an experience of nearly 3 decades to his IIoT Startup, LivNsense ; Sumana , co-founder of Goavega, who has created a product engineering factory and created products for global customers right here from Bengaluru, and Jaichander, my alumni from NIT -Trichy and founder of Sarcon, whose event technology product is being recognized not just here by bodies like NASSCOM but also internationally like Govt. of Singapore.

We also collected their insights on

1. Trends and Observations in Startup world across industries pre and post Covid era

2. What are the opportunities and challenges they are getting into

3. Elevator pitches of their companies

4. What they look up to from GCC ; is it investment or is it tech partnership

5. Their recommendations on engagement (pilot,etc)

You can view the recorded version of the interviews in here

Couple of Important Takeaways on Corporate Innovation / Startup Engagement from GCC leaders were

1. Startup should have a pointed solution for pointed problem. There might be a temptation to get into many industries and do whatever is easy to grab , for quick wins but then startup will lose its focus and might find themselves un-wittingly across large SI , where its difficult to fight out

2. GCC should look into long drawn procurement process which is taxing and often deterrent for startups to engage.

PS: We would be starting series on Industry and Service specific theme discussions from our next. If you are in GCC sector or engaged with these and want to share your views , learning, do ping me and let me know . We would definitely like to hear from you.