What The Enterprise Can Learn From Eureka Park Startups At CES 2022

CES 2022, the biggest technology show in the world is happening this week. Every year, CES is a showcase for new products in a variety of industries, and while big name companies headline the show, it’s often the smaller firms that bring the most innovative ideas to Las Vegas.

The Consumer Technology Association produces the show, and CTA President and CEO Gary Shapiro agrees with me. So much so that he runs CES “for the sake of entrepreneurs with new ideas,” which is why CES features Eureka Park — an entire hall dedicated to showcasing startups.

And while those startups attend CES to connect with and learn from large companies, I think that enterprise businesses can learn from their startup counterparts, too — particularly when it comes to innovating and new product introduction (NPI). 

Startups are, by definition, about creating disruptive new products, after all. 

Fail Fast, Fail Often

“You need space to make mistakes, because innovation — creating something new — only comes from experimentation and failure,” according to Anna Barnacka, Founder and CEO of MindMics, and a 2022 Eureka Park exhibitor. 

Barnacka’s background is in research and astrophysics, so she’s used to sifting through a lot of ideas to find one that works (in her world, a 90% failure rate is extraordinarily low). It’s a lesson all of us who have designed or built a new product know well: trial and error are a critical part of the development process that you want to move through as quickly as possible. The faster you can iterate on early concepts, the faster you can identify the best ideas and get to revenue with breakthrough innovations. 

And startups excel at that experimentation, in part because they don’t have multiple layers of decision making or legacy procedures slowing them down. Startups are, quite literally, built for rapid innovation.

Enterprise companies, generally speaking, aren’t. But that doesn’t mean that enterprise businesses can’t create innovative environments within their organizations. For example, many large enterprises have discrete innovation labs that operate like startups, including the Silicon Valley lab I led at Ford. 

Leaders with a willingness to adapt — and the patience and fortitude to restructure their operations — can create space for their teams to operate with the high speed, dynamic approach endemic to startups.

Innovation From Collaboration

Another critical element of startup success is collaboration. According to Barnacka, the cross pollination of ideas from a variety of disciplines was key to MindMics innovation — experts in physics, engineering and biosciences all contributed to develop the company’s unique health tracking technology. 

That collaborative magic can be lost in enterprise companies, however, when people are siloed in their respective departments. Again, leadership can bring it back by taking a collaborative approach to new product development and removing the barriers between departments.

And the collaboration doesn’t stop with your team.

Run Lean, Run Fast

Building new hardware has a ton of up front costs and capital expenditures, and while enterprises have the funds to make those investments, that doesn’t mean they should. Startups make difficult choices given limited resources, and understand when to look outside of their organization to get what they need. 

Dr. James Vetter, serial entrepreneur and Founder and Chairman of Transmed7, believes strongly in the power of a lean team to innovate and move quickly. Vetter says that in his previous medical device companies, “we had everything brought in house because we wanted to control our own timelines.” 

With Transmed7, he built a small team focused on designing and commercializing multiple instruments, then partnered with a digital manufacturing company to handle prototyping and production — eliminating millions in annual overhead costs and shaving years off product development timelines.

It stands to reason that enterprise organizations can save time and money by strategically leveraging outside partnerships and expertise, too. 

The Bottom Line

Creating the best bits of startup magic and cascading it throughout a large organization requires a structural approach. So, here’s what I think enterprise leaders looking to bring the best startup elements to their product development teams should keep in mind: 

1. Create an environment where innovators are empowered to experiment, free to fail, and enabled to move fast
2. Collaborative environments cultivate innovation
3. Running lean keeps costs down and the focus where it ought to be