Today’s book is about one way in which large corporations can be entrepreneurial: by partnering with external startups. Specifically, it is about key principles and practices that have been distilled from the entrepreneurial actions of managers who helped their corporations engage with startups. To be clear, as our audience knows well by now, opening an innovation lab here and organizing a hackathon there won’t make an Impactful difference. This is about substantive programmatic interventions that could ultimately underpin a more fundamental change of the organization as a whole becoming more entrepreneurial. This book tackles corporate-startup partnering in three parts. The Why, The How and The Where. In part one, our guest gave an overview of his over 15 years of research, which involved over 400 interviews with corporate managers, startup entrepreneurs, and other individuals involved in corporate-startup partnering and in part 1, he introduced some of the key players who placed the way to the Microsoft gorilla learning to dance with startups and … vice versa.

We welcome back the author of “Gorillas Can Dance: Lessons from Microsoft and Other Corporations on Partnering with Startups” Shameen Prashantham. In Part 1 we focussed on an overview of startup partnering. Part 2 zoomed into the Why to partner in the first place and the asymmetries that exist between startup and Gorilla. Part 3 was all about the How!

The finale is about the Where and the bigger Why.

More about this book and Shameen: https://www.gorillascandance.com