White paper on collaboration with startups

Customer issues

Wishing to accelerate its innovation activity and increase its efficiencý, the IT department of Total's Marketing & Services branch, like a large number of large companies, collaborates with startups in order to benefit from their agilitý, creativitý, and contribution of skills. As these ways of working are new, the secrets and best practices of a successful collaboration are not yet well known or mastered. This is why Tasmane was mandated to conduct a study around innovation and collaboration of large groups with startups. The main objective was to define best practices for setting up a win-win agreement and operation.

Key points

Tasmane's managers activated their respective networks in order to meet a large number of innovation players in the Paris area. With the client, the team mobilized by Tasmane was able to meet with CIOs, Chief Digital Officers, young entrepreneurs, VCs and startup incubators in order to gather their visions and feedback on the innovation activities they have carried out as well as on the collaborations between large groups and startups that they have experienced.

Results

The deliverable produced by Tasmane is a 40-page white paper detailing general best practices as well as customized recommendations for Total, based on several themes:

• How to meet startups, how to choose and evaluate them?
• How to experiment well and make sure to go from experimentation (POC) to industrialization?
• How to maintain a good relationship with the startup throughout the collaboration?
• How to manage reversibilitý with the startup?
• How to retain and secure key human resources?
• What is the role of the IT department in innovation and collaboration with startups?
• How do we deal with intellectual propertý topics?
• How to set up and sustain intrapreneurship activities?