A multinational company's innovation journey requires consistent structure, discipline, and a willingness to evolve.
And in the energy sector, where timelines are long, risks are high, and innovation is non-negotiable, partnering with startups was all about designing a repeatable system that bridges corporate structure with startup agility.
One particular global energy company has spent the past six years doing exactly that: refining a startup collaboration framework that now runs like a well-oiled machine. From defining internal needs to scaling proven technologies, their open innovation (OI) framework has become a benchmark on how to collaborate with a startup—and make startup partnership and venture clienting work at scale.
Their success offers critical, practical lessons for any large corporation aiming to move beyond ad-hoc pilots and establish a repeatable, high-value startup ecosystem.
Today, we’ll explore five main startup collaboration example takeaways we learned from their inspiring journey.
Here’s what a company’s six-year journey teaches about turning innovation into a repeatable system:
Startup collaboration models should never be innovation for innovation's sake. Instead, this process must be deeply rooted in your company's strategic requirements.
Every effective collaboration begins with clarity. Instead of a vague “let’s work with startups” approach, this company built its innovation funnel around formal briefs such as detailed descriptions of each business need, complete with scope, technical requirements, and success metrics.
In turn, this structure ensured internal alignment long before scouting began. Business units, R&D teams, and the innovation office worked from a shared understanding of what success looked like. This resulted in faster decisions, fewer mismatches, and solutions that were relevant from day one.
A huge barrier to corporate-startup collaboration is often the risk of a startup investing significant time and resources into an unpaid pilot that goes nowhere.
This energy company's model overcomes this by prioritizing trust and shared risk early on. The core objective of any collaboration is the PoC, where the startup's solution is tested for its technical fit and business value.
Startups can’t thrive on exposure alone. Recognizing this, the company made every Proof of Concept (PoC) paid by default — a simple but powerful trust signal that turned collaboration into partnership.
As the company's Head of Scouting put it:
"We built a consensus-rich process over six years, with startups as 90% of our target. Proofs of Concept are always paid, but only scaled if they prove real value."
By attaching financial commitment to every PoC, both side - Startup and Corporate shared accountability.
An innovation process doesn’t work in isolation, it requires buy-in across departments. So for a startup solution to succeed, the internal customer must feel ownership from day one.
The company’s open innovation unit positioned itself as an internal broker, facilitating collaboration between R&D, operations, and business leaders, guiding BUs to take co-ownership of ideas from day one. This distributed model reduced resistance later in the process, when scaling decisions often stall due to lack of ownership.
Here’s how it looked in action:
Another major challenge in open innovation is visibility. Who’s working on what? How many initiatives are active? What value has been realized so far?
These questions often go unanswered when information lives in silos (scattered across spreadsheets, inboxes, and disconnected tools), which makes it nearly impossible to track progress or demonstrate impact.
To solve this, the company centralized its entire innovation funnel on the digital innosabi platform. Every need, scouting activity, and PoC became a traceable card in a living system, which was accessible to both the innovation unit and relevant business teams. Dashboards provided instant insights into the number of startups evaluated, top technology areas, and project status.
With this new capability, managers can now instantly view:
This shift from scattered Excel sheets to a digital ecosystem transformed innovation reporting from a chore into a strategic tool.
Innovation isn’t about endless pilots. The corporate company treated PoCs as part of a larger decision funnel: test, measure, and either scale or close.
A Technology Catalogue inside their innosabi platform documented every solution that proved its value, complete with results, investment data, and collaboration status. The company built a key feature into its platform: the Technology Catalogue. And this catalogue acts as an internal marketplace, accessible only to BU stakeholders, explicitly compiling solutions that have:
Now this living library is a go-to resource for business units looking to replicate success, which saves them time and avoids duplicate efforts.
Over six years, this global energy leader has proven that startup collaboration is a discipline. By grounding their approach in clear processes, paid partnerships, and transparent tracking, they’ve built a model where innovation moves faster and scales wider than ever before.
For corporates looking into Corporate Venture, platforms like innosabi Startup make this level of structure and visibility achievable. From need definition to value tracking, innosabi provides the backbone for organizations to transform ad-hoc experimentation into a sustainable, data-driven innovation engine.
