As part of the Startup Europe Partnership, we ran a competition to identify the most ‘startup-friendly’ corporates in Europe, involving an open call for nominations and a review of corporate submissions by an expert panel.

This short report summarises the open innovation practices of the finalists, focussing on the different mechanisms by which they are working with startups.

Key findings

• We detect a growing trend in corporates outsourcing acceleration programmes to third parties, driven in part by concerns about financial sustainability of these programmes.
• Our analysis confirms that European corporations are mildly acquisitive, in comparison with US counterparts.
• Among the corporate finalists that were examined, 84 per cent had a dedicated open innovation unit, 52 per cent ran an accelerator programme and 32 per cent participated in accelerators run by third parties, whilst 87 per cent had active procurement programmes involving startups.