Investigation of models of innovation, entrepreneurship and investment being internally employed in multinational food companies

Summary

This report has been written for the MLA Donor Company (MDC), a fully-owned subsidiary of Meat & Livestock Australia.

The purpose of this report is to investigate the accelerator models employed by large food and agricultural multinational companies, and identify those that could be used as a reference for the Australian and New Zealand meat industry to develop an effective entrepreneurial eco-system that will support high growth disruptive innovation.

While the companies considered in this report have various different reasons for establishing an accelerator, there are many similarities:

• Large companies are able to use an accelerator to leverage the disruptive innovation that can come from startups and entrepreneurs because of their willingness to experiment and take risks.
• Accelerators help bridge the gap between traditionally slow moving corporates and lean agile startups.
• For companies that have not traditionally encouraged innovation, an accelerator provides a platform to bring employees together from across multiple markets and business units that may never have had a reason to cross paths before.

Accelerators help to create a sense of innovation inside a company that may not traditionally have an entrepreneurial culture. Several accelerators in this report introduced a channel where individuals – from both inside and outside the organisation – can send suggestions. This helps to encourage a new way of thinking within a business, and allows new concepts, ideas, and value propositions to be developed. 

For large corporates, accelerators are able to provide:a method for bringing fresh business and product ideas into a large, slow moving corporate.a source for innovative ideas from an external perspective, unencumbered by complex internal R&D processes.access to disruptive opportunities without distracting the parent company from its core business functions and operations.an opportunity to grow internal innovativeness and develop an entrepreneurial culture.

For the startup, an accelerator can provide a shortcut to commercialisation, with access to advice and support from advisors, senior decision makers, and mentors within multinationals and brands, including market intelligence and expertise to test, refine, and scale the product. Accelerators can also provide:

• deeply established customer and supply chain relationships, allowing startups to move quickly beyond the local entrepreneurship community, and towards a global market.
• funding and access to office space, and infrastructure– although this is not the case for all accelerator models.
  the ability to pilot products through a global brand with rapid speed to market, which can save the startup considerable costs usually associated with business development activities.
• large scale-up possibilities, potentially spanning multiple brands and geographies.