Innovate. Collaborate. Grow!

The past ten years are characterized by a strong growth in entrepreneurship and the accelerated creation of new businesses offering innovative products and services.

The focus of this book is on startups and scaleups intending to scale their business through collaboration with corporates, primarily in the capacity of client or venture partner. No startup or scaleup can go-it-alone entirely and is required to collaborate with other partners to ensure growth.

It is crucial for startups and scaleups to think beyond (corporate) venture capital financings and actively use a vast spectrum of corporate partnering arrangements to scale their business.

This book thus takes an expansive approach and analyzes corporate partnering transactions from a much broader perspective, covering several types of partnering models for collaboration between corporates and startups and scaleups, with a very strong focus on the perspective of the startups and scaleups while engaging in these types of transactions.

Target audience

The main reason for writing this book is to provide strategic, but at the same time practical guidance for the analysis, design, negotiation and implementation of a broad range of corporate partnering transactions.

You should read this book if you are:

• an entrepreneur planning to grow the startup through the design, adoption and execution of a corporate partnering strategy

• a corporate planning to collaborate with startups and scaleups through different corporate partnering transactions

• an investor desiring to contribute to the growth strategy of portfolio companies through funding and strong partnering expertise

• a transaction professional desiring to learn more about the complexity of corporate partnering transactions

Peter de Keyzer –Growth Inc

"What do you need to grow your company? A plan, money, ideas, hard work and of course opportunities. Collaboration is not something that automatically springs to mind. However, David Dessers shows that collaboration is an excellent way forward to look for more growth. David has a tremendous amount of experience in facilitating collaboration and partnerships which means he easily takes you through all the steps and pitfalls, opportunities and strategies you need to know about. This book is filled to the brim with new insights, many interesting examples and deserves to be widely read by anyone interested in innovation, co-creation, corporate partnering and profitable growth."

Sven De Cleyn – imec.istart Program Manager

“This book not only gives a comprehensive overview of potential collaborative models that enable startups to scale, but also practical insights and recommendations supporting daily operations. Must-read for founders and managers that seek to engage with partners to scale their business.”

Jürgen Ingels – Serial Entrepreneur

“Reducing time by learning from others is an important success factor for companies in a digital world. This book is a great tool to apply this time reduction law and to learn how to get corporate partnering done in a faster and more efficient way.”