What start-ups can teach established companies

When you’re working at a large company, it’s easy to get complacent. You have a safe, consistent stream of capital, an entrenched reputation and plenty of other people to support you if you slip up. The result? A lack of innovation, leading to dozens of missed opportunities.

In recent years, start-up incubator Pollenizer has been advising larger companies which want to replicate the innovative, gung-ho culture of a start-up within the walls of their organisation.

Established businesses need to be concerned about this. Pollenizer CEO Phil Morle says a lack of innovation in established companies means they’re missing out.

“Gerry Harvey [at Harvey Norman] is a classic example. The customers are going online and there are amazing opportunities to make billions and billions of dollars. This is not the time to be stopping and complaining about online retail, this is the time to learn from it and invent the future,” Morle says.

He says Pollenizer came to the attention of large corporations following the successful implementation of one of their start-up companies.

“We conceived of, launched and sold a whole company for many millions of dollars within a 12- month period,” he says, referring to Spreets, which sold for around $40 million. “So those larger companies looked at us and said, ‘That whole cycle happened faster than we would organise the meetings to discuss whether this is an interesting opportunity’.”

It’s that spirit of innovation and flexibility that Morle thinks big companies need to learn from start-ups.

“At the heart of every start-up is an entrepreneur, and that entrepreneur has something at stake; something they can win and something they can lose,” he says.

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