Navigating the new frontiers of innovation

TechNexus began nearly fifteen years ago to connect Chicago's tech startup community and help entrepreneurs build better businesses. For corporations, the frontier of innovation has moved beyond internal R&D — and the companies that learn to navigate these new frontiers will define what comes next.

BigCo leaders must learn to navigate the new frontiers of innovation. TechNexus began nearly fifteen years ago to bring Chicago’s nascent tech startup community together to create meaningful relationships and connect entrepreneurs in ways that helped us all build better businesses. Plenty of large companies also found value from this “frontier of innovation,” discovering new partners, new ideas, and learning “the ways” of communicating and working more effectively with entrepreneurs. Chicago’s startup community grew up, and today there are dozens of great resources for nurturing our young companies. TechNexus then evolved and became more focused: we recognized the most valuable role we could (continue to) play was as “the guide” to the frontier, helping large companies learn to navigate, to “speak the language” of entrepreneurs (natives to the frontier of innovation), to build relationships and to explore and grow business together. Today, TechNexus is one of the most active venture investors in the country, targeting investments at the heart of collaborations with corporate partners. BigCos across the globe are experiencing unprecedented economic disruption. Nearly 3 out of 4 companies on the Fortune 1000 list a decade ago are no longer listed today. Within the next 10 years, half of the Fortune 500 will have fallen off the list — even without the influence of the global coronavirus pandemic. Ironically, most big companies still won’t recognize the likelihood that they will quickly end up on the losing end of these equations. The “wild frontier” is now just outside every company’s front door, and adapting to the rapid, chaotic, ever-changing market is an essential survival skill. It’s not that large company CEOs are blind to the risk, but many (just like gilded settlers of old) are headed down the trail with bloated wagon loads, and too few of the right tools and skills they will need. To survive (and then thrive), they’ll need entrepreneurial pathfinders and colla

By Terry Howerton at TechNexus Venture Collaborative