Tuesday, March 31, 2009

PARTNERS IN PROGRESS

Priya C Nair
The Economic Times

Experts suggest that if start-ups are provided with proper support from well-established organisations that belong to the same sector, it could create more opportunities for India Inc., as a whole. Today, it is possible, for both, the start-up and the industry to jointly identify and execute businesses through industry-start-up collaborations.

Partners in growth

Mango Technologies, a startup founded in 2006, is a provider of software solutions for mobile application framework for ultra low-end to mid-end terminal devices. To take the organisation to newer realms of growth and in a quest to achieve an edge in today’s competitive market, Mango Technologies started collaborating with Qualcomm during the end of 2007.

“We are testing our products on the chip sets of Qualcomm and we are also licensing some of our products to them,” says Sunil Maheshwari, co-Founder and CEO, Mango Technologies about the collaboration. Maheshwari believes that to facilitate the growth opportunities of a start-up, such partnerships are extremely important. “If you want to be a successful product company and deliver products for a worldwide market, then you cannot do it alone, especially as a startup. An understanding with an established firm in your own stream of business really helps in ensuring that,” adds Maheshwari. The benefits of such collaborations are many.

Maheshwari explains, “From Qualcomm, we get all the required support and the much needed platform to test our software. We get early feedback from their teams about our product, which helps us to refine our strategies. Also, we get visibility in terms of the kind of business that is coming our way so that we can plan accordingly.”

Another advantage, according to him is that the team at Mango gets to work with the international team in Qualcomm and because of their multi-national presence; products of Mango get worldwide exposure and prominent visibility in the global market. It is not just the start-up firm that is benefiting out of this collaboration. The partnership brings in several opportunities for the industry as well.

“Qualcomm gets to know the full potential of their chip sets through our products. It also helps them to show a demo of their chip sets with our products to their customers. This is helping both of us to sell more products in the market,” informs Maheshwari.

Even though such collaborations were in existence in more mature markets like the US, it is still taking baby steps in India. So, it is not an easy task for a start-up to get associated with a well-established firm. Maheshwari is of the opinion that as product development gains ground in India, more global firms will start putting more faith in our Indian talent. If we have one or two success stories from India about such associations, more and more such collaborations will come up in future.

Partners in success

“Having witnessed various innovations with respect to our area of expertise in several start-up firms, we realised that by partnering with such firms, we would be able to launch a lot of innovations in the market, that too, at a much faster pace,” says Harsha Angeri, director, strategy & new initiatives, Honeywell Technology Solutions Lab. Honeywell has a tie up with a micro-enterprise creator in the healthcare vertical that takes healthcare to rural India by leveraging existing technology and also by avoiding the need for hiring highly trained medical professionals. “Initially, when we interacted for the first time, we realised that both the firms were focused on the same sector. But Honeywell did not have the channels to take its products to the rural markets. Hence, a gap was created that needed to be bridged so that we would reach out to a larger target audience. And the start-up firm helped achieve our purpose as they were well equipped with all the requirements to reach out to the rural audience,” explains Angeri.

The functioning of collaboration works in a peculiar way wherein the start-up does the front-end work and Honeywell provides the backend support. The role of Honeywell is to define the business model, provide technology and also facilitate scaling up and commercialisation of the business. Meanwhile, the start-up has to develop microfranchises and build a viable supply-chain system. Also, they have to offer support in developing a model, which is scalable and replicable in the future.

It is a win-win situation for both involved in this collaboration, says Angeri. Honeywell is able to achieve the domain expertise of the start-up and it also allows the company to reach the end-consumer in case of business-to-consumer start-ups as Honeywell deals mostly with B2B customers. Start-ups, on the other hand get access to the customer and the real world feedback; they also get Honeywell’s feedback in areas which Honeywell is strong in and they also get the market reach and credibility by dealing with a larger company like Honeywell,” informs Angeri. “The speed with which the entrepreneurship culture is catching up in India, we are bound to see more such collaborations in the near future,” says Angeri.

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