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Accelerate your startup with one of the region’s largest and most innovative food & beverage companies

Scale your startup with Qantas one of the world’s most trusted and innovative brands

Australia’s first HR tech Accelerator in partnership with Seek, Hudson and UTS

Our Corporate Partners

HCF
NRMA
Ingdirect
IS&RD master
beyond-bank
PwC
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Sparke
Artesian
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Bootstart

Are you an entrepreneur who has that great idea? Bootstart is designed by Ash Maurya, the world’s most recognised thought leader in how to build a tech company. Learn his secrets by applying to Bootstart.

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Startups

You have an idea, you have a team but you need seed capital, a mentor driven program and access to customers to turn your idea into a viable business. Our accelerator program is perfect for you

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Scaleups

Your company is flying, great team, great tech, customers, revenue, what you need now is access to a large corporate with millions of customers. Our Scaleup program delivers just that.  

Corporate Innovation

How We Can Help
The Problems We Solve
How We work
How We Can Help

Slingshot supplies large corporates with world-class innovation programs. We do this by providing programs that bring corporates together with small disruptive startups and entrepreneurs who are building innovative and potentially market changing technologies.

‘We match corporates with top-end entrepreneurs who create game-changing technology for your market’

Our corporate innovation programs provide entrepreneurs with finance, mentorship and a dynamic work environment that stimulates creativity and productivity. Our programs are rigorous, rapid and can achieve dramatic commercial results. This is not theatre. The results are real and you can expect:

  • new commercial opportunities
  • valuable market insight and learnings
  • access to talent and new technology
  • media exposure
  • improved company-wide understanding of innovation
  • exposure to potential new customers

The startups bring skills in starting with potentially business changing technology to our corporate customers providing real business impact. Your corporate brings skills in scaling businesses and your large customer base to rapidly deliver great outcomes for your customers

Slingshot is delivering these programs to some of Australia’s and global leading brands including the HCF, ING Direct, NRMA and Simplot Australia.

Slingshot is changing the way large companies innovate

The Problems We Solve

Large companies are facing increasing competition from small, agile startup companies who are disrupting markets with innovative products and services. The boards and senior executives of these large companies are becoming increasingly worried about a rapidly emerging cliff, where their product offerings will simply become irrelevant overnight, their own “Kodak Moment”.

‘While new competitors are emerging all the time, this is a new paradigm where disruptive startups can enter markets with new low cost technology and become the market leader more rapidly than ever before’

Strong seemingly impenetrable monopolistic businesses such as Taxi payments provider Cabcharge have had new disruptive competitors emerge such as Uber, a transport company that owns no taxis and employs 3 people in Australia wipe 50% or almost $350m of market capitalisation off its stock price in 12 months.

This new paradigm is a direct challenge to government and importantly to corporate innovation globally.

Unsurprisingly, there are not many examples of  companies disrupting themselves, primarily because it sounds like a counter-intuitive thing to do. This is what’s described as the innovator’s dilemma.

‘Why would a company create a competing product to its own business? The answer is simple – survival’

Large companies are typically poor innovators; corporate systems are designed to maintain the status quo. Employees are incentivised to simply sell more products through well- known sales and distribution channels. Some companies excel at “sustaining innovations” – driving internal R&D programs where significant resources are spent on building new products to distribute to existing customers. Sustaining Innovations maintains company growth, but does not protect the company from new agile entrants that can efficiently take massive market share seemingly overnight.

Increasingly, corporates are becoming aware of this threat. The question is what to do about it. Slingshot has engaged with many corporates in the last five years and most have some form of internal sustaining innovation program. However, unless your company is born with an innovation culture (e.g Google, Apple) internal innovation is hard, corporate culture (DNA) and middle management headwinds (Antibodies) means that in reality, most corporate innovation programs either produce little or are slow and expensive to run.

Slingshot offers a new approach – Slingshot is changing the way large companies innovate.

How We work
Next

1. Collaborate to agree themes

We work with you to develop specific themes that align with your corporate innovation objectives and strategy

Test

2. Recruit and select entrepreneurs

We recruit a cohort of entrepreneurs at early, startup or scaleup stages who have innovative ideas that align with your specific corporate innovative themes. We work with you to select the best applicants.

Collaborate

3. Validate and test

We run a tailored 12-week corporate accelerator program in which the entrepreneurs are mentored and validate and test their ideas with a goal of bringing it to market,

Entrepreneurs

4. You decide the next step

The corporate accelerator companies enter a three month incubation period. You can choose to integrate the idea in your business or to take an equity position at a discount in the first capital raising.

NRMA Case Study

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HCF Case Study

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