Offering
Scouting
Duration
1-2 months
What you get
- Market Insight via company long-list
- Facilitated Matching & F2F meetings
- Next step planning
What you provide
- The brief
- Ranking review
- Ability to meet innovators
Do you want to meet innovators relevant to your business? Vertical will provide you with tailored insights into trends and solutions. We will be searching internationally for innovative startups and scaleups, and connect you with the most promising ones.
Running a scouting round will get you familiar with disruptive solutions available on the market. Instead of developing technology from scratch, you can team up with a growth company and discover new market opportunities together.
Scouting is a service that has a very low risk. You only commit to learning more about the market. By presenting your interest in open innovation publically, you also attract interesting inbound proposals longterm.
Scope the brief
Together, we clarify the areas you are interested in and set the parameters for the scouting. We evaluate what market segments should be included and determine if the desired outcome is an exploratory mapping of what’s out there, or finding the most suitable companies related to your needs.
Optimise message for outreach
Our team will frame your brief into an actionable message for the outreach. This will help the startups and scaleups understand what you are interested in, and allows them to proactively share their takes on the matter. We offer you two outreach options to pick from:
Public outreach
By publicly announcing your collaboration aims, we will gather the most out-of-the-box ideas and identify links that might not be too obvious. This also benefits your company by presenting its interest in innovation partnerships.
Under-the-radar Action
The Vertical team can hand-pick frontrunners in your technology and service areas without publishing an open call. This may be interesting for you when you are working on an undisclosed project-area. In this case, your outreach materials will be tailored to target only the teams shortlisted by you through the review process.
Top-candidate review & evaluation
We break down the findings into rankings based on parameters we have agreed upon within the brief. We go through this list together to evaluate which teams you want to meet.
Meet the teams
We facilitate meetings between you and the teams to explore possible collaborative steps together. This can be done physically in a more collaborative workshop format, or online.
Scouting is a service that has a very low risk. You only commit to learning more about the market. By presenting your interest in open innovation publicly, you also attract interesting inbound proposals longterm.
Expected outcomes
Market Insight through longlisted startups
The first tangible outcome of the Scouting project is a long list of innovations that match your original brief. This list will give you a 360-degree overview of the market forefront in your innovation area. On-demand, we can spice it up with an additional market overview report, analysing the trends.Facilitated innovation-ranking process and f2f meetings
The Vertical team will help you to shortlist the teams that are the most suitable for your current aims. The process of selection and interviews is tailored to reflect the processes within your company.Visible next steps through the facilitated interviews
You will receive the digest of your face-to-face interviews with the possible next steps outlined for your collaborations. On-demand, our team can also provide you with strategy maps or additional workshops for teams of your choice.Planning further collaboration
Follow-up
What are the next steps you need to take with your champion team? As an optional service follow-up to the scouting, we’d like to offer you an actionable strategy map for your collaboration. Based on your setup and needs we will pair you with our internal talents, who will plan your collaboration path. We offer workshops, mappings, and team-trainings, as well as the end-to-end collaboration project support. Whether you want to run a small demo or a full-scale pre-market validation pilot — we’ve got tools to support you along the way.
More details?
Please get in touch with Lars Melakoski if you should have any questions or if you need more details.
Lars Melakoski
Strategy | Collaboration
lars@vertical.vc+358 50 323 8819