Innovation and entrepreneurship pose demanding challenges to large corporates. The Innovation and Corporate Entrepreneurship Center (ICE), jointly founded by B4i and SDA Bocconi, is a catalyst for research, training and business support. It aims to boost the entrepreneurial energy of corporates, while also supporting them managing the firm and the sources of uncertainty in the market to reduce the barriers to innovation.
A set of customizable services are available for both individuals and corporate teams to support and boost the identification and development of innovation opportunities.
Following ad hoc preliminary meetings, ICE typically offers a tailored pathway to understand and tackle the major innovation challenges the corporate client is facing. The current offering aims to provide corporates with information about best practices, business and technology trends, while also putting them in contact with early-stage business ideas and startups to investigate business development opportunities.
While every company requires a certain level of customization of the Innovation Journey, it may follow some common steps.
Case studies are particularly useful to understand a company and they become flexible instruments for future strategy developments and training programs. The Faculty at SDA Bocconi has a track record of business cases that later supported the development of fruitful projects, such as corporate Academy programs.
Based on a firm’s strategy (and ideally its case study), the Innovation workshop points to develop an innovation strategy, i.e. a plan to grow revenues and/or profits by creating new products, services and business lines.
Innovation contests are calls for ideas addressed to the client’s employees on specific topics selected by the top management together with ICE. The objective of an innovation contest is to unleash the company’s and the employees’ innovation potential, boosting engagement internally and scouting high-potential innovation opportunities.
Typically the outputs of an Innovation contest include:
Identifying and investigating startups can anticipate the major challenges a company will soon face. ICE developed a 2 steps methodology for a focused startup radar:
Corporates with very early stage promising ideas can consider the corporate Pre-Acceleration, a crafted educational program aimed at creating complete product teams and taking them from a concept idea to a minimum viable product.
In a 10 modules program, ICE aims to transfer the main empirical skills needed to build successful innovation.
Corporate clients are highly engaged in the Experts Club, an initiative launched with B4i institutional and research partners, including Politecnico di Milano, Università Statale di Milano, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Plug&Play and Henkel X.
The B4i Experts Club meets up regularly for virtual or face-to-face breakfast and happy hours, to informally discuss themes emerging across all B4i programs.
BIF is the two-day annual conference organized by B4i and SDA Bocconi on grand challenges, technology and business innovation. BIF’s scope is to facilitate debate and idea generation among academics, researchers, corporations, startups and investors.
All corporates enrolled in ICE’s programs are invited to attend the Conference but also to contribute to its design and especially to the selection of the main underlying theme of each edition.
Contact us and we will be happy to give you more details about our services and their potential.
