Ricardo Marvao is co-founder of Beta-i, a collaborative innovation platform with global reach founded in 2010. The platform was the main builder of the startup ecosystem in Lisbon and today focuses on designing and managing projects for large corporations around the world, including strategy, pilot testing and venture building. Marvao developed the Innov.Club concept back in 2022 and launched it later that year with law firm VdA to bring together the largest corporates in Portugal in a peer-learning environment. He also co-founded a number of educational projects in Portugal like Próxima Geração (an academy for the next generation of young politicians), the Singularity University Portugal (training thousands of executives/year), the European Innovation Academy (entrepreneurship summer school for 500 global university students/year for the past 10 years), Cientista Regressa à Escola (science education for primary schools through a global network of 1000 PhDs and today reaching over 8,000 primary school students) and the “Space for Business” (teaching the business side of the Space industry) post-graduate program with the European Space Agency (ESA) and business schools St.Gallen, RSM & NovaSBE. Marvao has over 10 years international experience in the space industry, sending satellites to space, working for the ESA, Inmarsat, Airbus, Embraer and many others. He recently spoke to The Innovator about the value of collaborative innovation.
Q: Tell us about how Beta-i got started
RM: I spent 10 years in the space industry and created my own startup. In 2010 I sold it, and came back to my country, Portugal. At that time Portugal went bankrupt and there was a lot of unemployment, and so I got together with a bunch of other entrepreneurs and brainstormed about how to help the country. We decided to create this non-profit called Beta-i focused on using entrepreneurship as a way out of the crisis. We helped create an innovation ecosystem and this led to a grassroots movement that created thousands of startups. After 10 years of working with startups we decided to help create the next phase. Many of these startups were already in the market selling and wanting to scale. So, instead of helping startups with two to four founders, we started to help the companies that already had 20 to 100 employees who wanted to win the big whales in the corporate world as clients. This led us to focus on the challenges of the business units of these large corporations, and how technology can solve those issues. The executives in those business units want to make their bosses happy and receive a bonus at the end of the year. The startups want a chance to find the right person inside that business unit that understands their technology and sees how their technology can solve a problem and increase revenue or decrease costs, enough for them to want to do a pilot and then, if the pilot is successful, sign a contract that gets them an entry into the company with a chance to do more.
Q: There are so many ways that relationships between corporates and startups break down. What have you seen work?
RM: Over the last few years, the number of pilots that transform into contracts have increased quite a lot because corporates are learning to work better with startups, and startups are also learning how to work better with corporates. Preparation is key. If you’re a corporate, maybe you have pre-approved forms so that you don’t take months on the legal side trying to organize a contract for a startup. Startups don’t want to receive a 100-page document and pay €5000 to a lawyer to analyze it. Then, on the technology side, you also want to create a technology sandbox with data that you want used for the pilot. You also need to choose the right people to work with the startups. Sometimes inside the corporation an executive is chosen to lead a pilot, but it’s not the right person because they don’t believe that the technology could or should come from outside the company. It’s very important that corporates choose the right person to lead and establish a timeline and a good budget because most startups don’t want to work for free, even on the pilot. Maybe they will do it at cost but still, you need some budget.
On the startup side, it’s also very important to prepare. In the startup world everything goes fast, but in the corporate world some things take time. It takes time to approve a budget to make sure that the pilot goes forward and it takes time to understand the right problem inside the company and decide whether the pilot should cover one area or the whole company. You need patience. Sometimes when I have conversations with corporates, I ask them how it was to work with the startup, and they say ‘Oh their technology is amazing, but the founders are a pain.’ They are difficult to work with, and they don’t understand that we can’t go as fast as they want. There needs to be an alignment of cultures. The more startups and corporates work together, the more they will start understanding each other. Maybe the first pilot didn’t work and maybe the second, but the third will. It’s like going to the gym. If you go once or twice you don’t really change physically but if you go constantly then you start seeing progress.
Q: Are you able to point to any examples of very successful startup corporate collaborations?
RM: There are many, but just to give you a sense we have been organizing a program called Free Electrons for the last ten years. It comprises half a dozen energy utilities – large corporates from around the world – including Europe, Australia, Asia and North America. The energy companies are looking for very specific areas of improvement in the energy sector. They used to be geographically locked. Now they’re buying parts of utilities all over the world as well as other businesses. They’ve been together for so many years now, it’s easy for them to have a conversation and understand whether a particular startup is worth doing a pilot with because maybe they already did one with another member who gave good or bad feedback. It means that you can do a lot more pilots, a lot faster, because you have these feedback loops. In the first edition we had maybe 10 pilots. Nowadays we have around 50 paid pilots, leading to a lot more successful collaborations between the corporates and the startups.
Q: If electric utilities in the Free Electrons group have a successful pilot with one, they share information, right? And so, then startups have a better chance of being able to sell into others…
RM: Not only do they share, sometimes a startup offers a solution to a problem that three utilities might have. The three utilities design the requirements for the pilot, share the costs and do one pilot. They all receive the results and then they decide. For the startup it is amazing, because they do one pilot and they could get three contracts. For the corporates there is a much lower cost on the pilot side, and there’s a peer learning aspect that’s very important. Working together creates bonds that help for the future. They stay together because they want to keep on learning. Plus, because they’re in different geographies, you can play with that. For example, a utility in Europe that wants to learn more about India’s markets. Through Free Electrons you can do a program in India with the utility there, and then everyone goes there, understands the market there and launches innovation challenges. From there the participants might say ‘Oh, now we want to do a program in China or Brazil or Canada, and so, depending on where they are, they can learn about what’s happening in a particular country in the energy sector, because there are geographical differences.
Q: Do you see AI increasing the pressure and need for not just utilities but all kinds of corporates to embrace collaborative innovation?
RM: AI brings big change and a lot of the corporates are not yet ready for that. For one it costs a lot of money. Executives worry about taking a wrong decision about the technology, so they decide to do small pilots with different vendors before choosing. The geopolitical context also factors in. Executives are thinking ‘wait there is a war now? Maybe that will change our business, so we need to do further analysis. They don’t know whether to do the investment now or wait, considering all the external things that are happening that are shifting the world so much. It is hard when there is much uncertainty. AI is a big investment, and it will change the way you work, and it will change the way people inside the company work.
Q: There is an argument that says this is not a technology problem. It is a leadership issue. Leaders need to make operational changes to fully leverage the power of AI.
RM: Peer learning works best in cases like this. That’s why we created the Innov.Club in 2022, right after we were coming out of the COVID mess. Every month, we do a session with all the C-level and the first-line directors, and then every six months we have a session just with the C-levels. It’s a place where leaders can come and share what they have learned. This is true for many areas, including AI. If you start explaining what your company is doing, and then you listen to all the other companies and all the other leaders, and how they are implementing AI, that will give you some insights and interesting ideas to try in your own organization. And you’re not alone anymore. Just like with Covid, AI brings a lot of change. If you don’t make decisions the teams under you will start asking whether you are the leader the organization needs in this new phase?
Q: So just like the companies that belong to Free Electrons have a place to collaborate, the Innov.Club gives C-level executives a place to do that.
RM: Yes. I think that it is super important to have a place to be among peers you trust who are going through the same challenges. One of the things we’ve seen is the more companies collaborate, the better the chance that they end up doing business together
Q: Are you talking about the Free Electrons Group or the Innov.Club?
RM: Both. Sometimes the companies we work with want to enter a new business area and they start talking, and realize ‘whoa, it could be interesting for us to collaborate, create a joint venture, or maybe use your technology with our brand in this new sector, and we’ll pay you a fee.’ There are deals to be made between corporates. Regularly meeting and talking is a good way for them to get to know each other and discuss not just business but also personal things like strategies to balance the job with their personal life. It can be lonely at the top, but it doesn’t have to be.
