Bain Innovation Exchange

The BIE’s Innovation Kickstarter helps you define and launch an innovation organization.

What to Expect: We’ll help you assess different innovation approaches and strategies, align senior leadership and other key stakeholders, create a roadmap for your launch, and connect with relevant players in the global start-up ecosystem.

How We Do It:  We start by diagnosing your current innovation activities and organizational readiness. Then we help you define your innovation ambition and your initial portfolio of approaches. We also work closely with you to prioritize the innovation spaces you’ll pursue, and map the market of disruptors in each space. And we help you mobilize by addressing talent needs and operating model considerations.

Why BIE: We support you with a diverse team of experienced corporate innovators, VCs, founders, product managers and ecosystem experts, and we give you access to a global network of start-ups and other key players, so you can form invaluable partnerships. We also provide access to Bain’s unmatched expertise in strategy, transformations and organization, as well as private equity and M&A due diligence expertise, helping you assess potential acquisitions that can jumpstart your innovation organization. 

Successful innovation depends in part on understanding where disruption is happening today, and where it will happen tomorrow. BIE's Ecosystem Scan help you do just that.

What to Expect: Whether we help you with a broad scan—assessing a wide swatch of trends, technologies and key players—or a narrow scan, looking specifically at vendors that serve your use case, we work closely with you to surface the key trends and insights you need to know to accelerate your innovation goals.

How We Do It: We take a workshop approach to help identify opportunity areas across your business, using our networks, proprietary databases and best-in-class tools. Then we filter the results down to the most relevant players, and connect you with them, in a single- or multi-day event.

Why BIE: We connect globally with a huge range of start ups, tech leaders, universities, accelerators and VCs, collaborating closely with them to understand the key trends and nuances of the early-stage tech ecosystem. Combined with our proprietary database of start-ups and our own expertise, we can help you develop the capability to "sense" the companies most worth partnering with. From consumer products to B2B services to e-commerce, we already have many success stories we can share.

From ideation to scale, Launchpad serves as a one-stop shop for all your venture-building needs. 

What to Expect:  We help you leverage your unique strengths to ensure the best and fastest results for your venture, and we augment your strengths with the talents of our product builders, growth hackers, and venture leaders. Test-and-learn and agile ways of working help you accelerate your results, as does access to our global start-up and VC ecosystem.

How We Do It: We collaborate with you to discover, build, launch and scale disruptive new businesses and products. Generate a portfolio of disruptive, market-tested idea; validate the value prop by piloting an MVP; rapidly build out the product to launch and commercialize; and, finally, scale the new venture and recruit the right talent.

Why BIE: We hit the ground running with our experienced Launchpad Venture Teams, drawn from a rich talent pool of experts and supported by best practices in successful start-up launches. We know what makes for a disruptive, high-value idea and what you need to execute on it, including the capabilities you’ll need internally to be sure your venture team succeeds over the long haul. We’ve helped companies in industries as diverse as banking, agriculture and oil & gas launch and scale breakthrough innovations.  

Our newly launched VC-as-a-Service platform is a unique program in which BIE acts as your corporate VC arm, amplifying the reach, leverage and success of your VC program. We understand what makes corporate venture funds succeed, both financially and strategically. Learn more about our comprehensive approach.