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Even if you can, it’s not nice to make money on kids or startups. They need good and sometimes firm guidance, a lot of care, reasonable challenges and a lot of love to become great adults, and then they might be able to deliver some returns. But the best coaches get their kicks from seeing them grow, learn and develop, sharing their success and enjoying the feeling of having played a role in the miracle. I question anyone who see startups as a market or business opportunity by itself. I don’t include investors since their bet is to get some returns when the startup has grown up and create themselves an incentive to help.

It is very valuable for kids to be with older and experienced people since they can provide a lot of experience and wisdom. The same goes for startups – being with grown up companies in the industry they target is immensely valuable. Established companies can provide feedback to plans and prototypes, advice on choice of partners and go to market approaches and so on. But they can also pay  them little to provide a prototype, POC or study the same way my grandmother paid me 1$ to cut her lawn – a great combination of making some money, getting a reference and still do something useful for the customer. I believe, generally speaking, that this is a much better approach than giving the kids 1000$ to go figure out something great.

Technology develops rapidly why innovation requires very sharp focus on technology and application. Since building a large international company from scratch takes a lot of time it’s often a better way to integrate the innovation in an exist large company to create value. With large organisations having to bring in innovation from outside and startups having to get their innovation into established companies’ solutions, channels and marketing those who learn how to do that well will be successful. This is exactly what we try to learn at THINGS, together with the sharpest hardware oriented startups in IoT, wearables, 3D scanning/printing, automation, robotics and medtech, and our open-minded industry partners like Assa Abloy, Husqvarna, ABB and NCC.