Cooperation between startup incubator YES!Delft and PwC
The cooperation between startup incubator YES!Delft and PwC should further strengthen the extensive ecosystem for startups. In addition, YES!Delft supports PwC in the case of innovation issues. "It would be really great if we can solve the challenges facing PwC's clients with technology from our startups", says Evert Jaap Lugt, managing director of YES!Delft, looking ahead.
Partnership YES!Delft and PwC - Edwin van Wijngaarden, Noor Sanders and Evert Jaap Lugt (from left to right)
Startup climate
"In terms of startup climate, we in the Netherlands are very good at innovations", says Evert Jaap Lugt, who has been working at YES!Delft for two and a half years. "We have made huge progress, but there is still a lot to be achieved: more cooperation between the public and private sectors and a focus on the domains in which we really want to be the best. My ambition is to ensure that YES!Delft grows from a local to a regional incubator with a global reach. Our expansions in The Hague and Rotterdam are the first steps; I firmly believe in the tremendous power of cooperation between different knowledge institutes."
Creating successful startups
At YES!Delft The Hague, the software domains of artificial intelligence, blockchain and cyber security are central. In Rotterdam, the cooperation between Delft University of Technology, Erasmus University and the Erasmus Medical Centre is taking shape. "Delft is the number one technical university, Erasmus University is the largest business university and Erasmus MC is the largest university medical centre in the Netherlands. If we bring together the talents of these three institutions at an early stage, we can create even better and more successful startups. Diversity in teams is the most important thing, particularly in founding teams, as they are called. You shouldn't give a robotics engineer another role by making him a sales director, that won't work. It's better to add someone with a business background to such a team, so that everyone continues to work on the basis of their strengths."
Government should boost and direct
"Furthermore, I see more and more changes in the awareness of administrators", Lugt continues. "They are leaving behind the island mentality and focusing more on how they can strengthen each other. We should not hesitate to invest more money, time and energy in strengthening areas in which we have opportunities. Top global starter ecosystems such as Tel Aviv (Israel), Silicon Valley (US) and Singapore were created in part due to extreme government interference. In the Netherlands, fear must make way for the realisation that this is important for the future of our country. Our government must have the courage to boost and direct: indicate in which areas we want to become big. Quantum technology, for example. In Delft we have some exceptionally good leading professors. The government recognizes this and has invested 135 million euros in the QuTech centre. This immediately created an ecosystem and Microsoft has also become involved and set up a hundred million euro lab, which in turn attracted other parties."
"If we can come up with very clear solutions to specific problems faced by PwC clients, then we will make an impact together and this will undoubtedly be a successful partnership."
Building Tomorrows Leading Firms
The ambition and slogan of YES!Delft is 'Building Tomorrow’s Leading Firms'. In addition to a strict admission selection, the incubator also has an increasing supervisory role during the process. "We help startups validate their ideas and guide them through the early and later stage", Lugt explains. "Once the startups have found their product market fit and their business model fit, they progress to the scale-up phase and it's time to leave our incubator. On the basis of available data – such as a significant turnover or plans for abroad – we increasingly monitor that process. The time available for this varies per startup and per domain, but when we encounter startups that have been working on their product market fit for too long, we say: that's a waste of your time. Have the courage to stop and go and do something else. Failure is not a bad thing, as long as you move on to the next idea and learn from your mistakes. I always compare innovation with a maze in which you try to find the exit. It's dark and you have no idea where you're going. If you follow a path and it turns out it's not the path to the exit, you haven't failed. You learned that that wasn't the path. Innovation is often about learning how something doesn't work, until you discover the right path one day."
"When we encounter startups that have been working on their product market fit for too long, we say: that's a waste of your time. Have the courage to stop and go and do something else. Failure is not a bad thing, as long as you move on to the next idea and learn from your mistakes."
"In order to better understand the many and rapid changes in the world and to serve our clients quicker with solid solutions, this cooperation is necessary."
Care-free environment for startups
In his quest to make YES!Delft the benchmark for the rest of the Netherlands, Evert Jaap Lugt is not doing things by halves. The programme that YES!Delft used to make startups successful was completely overhauled. The rigid system was replaced by a concept of masterclasses, in which the startups themselves determine what is relevant. "The rest of the time I want them to be fully occupied with their core business", Lugt emphasises. "We have created an organisation that provides 24/7 services, such as YES!Funded and YES!Talent. The first service maps out all financial instruments and arranges access, so that we can help our start-ups find the right funding at the right time. The second service helps startups find good people for their teams. Depending on the phase in which the startups are – validation, early stage, later stage or scale-up phase – we look at what type of people they need at that time. At first, they will need researchers or inventors, as they progress, they will require more and more administrators or commercial thinkers."
Entrepreneurship is a rare talent
The support from YES!Delft is also evident in making clear to the startup entrepreneurs who they are, what they are very good at, what they are not good at, and who they can involve. "Really good entrepreneurship is a rare talent", according to Lugt. "If you have a very strong founding team, with a very good vision and an enormous execution power, you don't need an incubator. Take Coolblue, Ayden, Booking.com or Elon Musk types who continuously show that they can create successful businesses. Coincidental success does not exist. We often still see people from the university coming up with a "solution" and they are looking for a problem to go with it: a solution-problem fit. While it is far better to take a problem from the market and find a solution to it. You can then build your technology or solution on the pain in question and you have paying customers immediately."
Cooperating with corporates
As launching customers, corporates can make an important contribution to the ambitions of YES!Delft. "Cooperation with corporates and the private sector is necessary", says Lugt. "We are a non-profit organisation and are 70% financed by them. In return, we can help corporates with their innovation challenges. We've set up an entire programme for that. In general, we teach corporates that we understand entrepreneurship and innovation very well. We see a lot of innovations fail at corporates because they are capable of ideation and validation, but then you get the turning point: who is going to execute it? That's where many corporates encounter a problem. That's because in a corporate, everyone has KPIs on the basis of his or her position and the culture is often not suited to rewarding people for displaying innovative behaviour. Unfortunately, many people in corporates still make careers through risk-averse behaviour. Just imagine, you take a risk and it goes wrong, that's the last thing you want. But innovative behaviour requires taking risks and daring to speak out. But for many corporates, that means the end of a career. By means of a special programme, we want to make corporates successful or more successful in the field of innovation. For that they have to step outside their comfort zones, because that is where the magic happens."
"We want to improve the quality of care in the Netherlands. That doesn't always mean more care, but more appropriate care. Innovations such as e-health solutions or solutions that simplify certain analyses are also part of this."
YES!Delft and PwC
Noor Sanders and Edwin van Wijngaarden, the PwC partners leading the cooperative venture with YES!Delft, welcome this approach. "We like to learn from YES!Delft how we can bring an innovative idea to fruition within a corporate environment like PwC", says Van Wijngaarden. "Startups can fully focus on their innovation, in our case it comes on top of serving our clients. That is occasionally quite a challenge."
"In addition, YES!Delft offers us an ecosystem with very relevant partners and developments in areas that are very important to the topics in which we at PwC are very active, such as MedTech, cyber and artificial intelligence", Noor Sanders adds. "In order to better understand the many and rapid changes in the world and to serve our clients quicker with solid solutions, this cooperation is necessary. We experience a transformation ourselves and help our clients with theirs. YES!Delft can support us in achieving this and at the same time we create a market for the startups within YES!Delft. If we can bring startups into contact more quickly with relevant parties who are looking for a solution, they can get to a product market fit or product solution fit more rapidly. Developments in technology can be so much quicker and more efficient. We connect the startups with our clients and the problems we try to solve and the knowledge that we contribute."
Evert Jaap Lugt nods in agreement. "Together with PwC, I would very much like to look into the client base and discover what problems and challenges their clients are facing. And how we can solve them by identifying which technology suits which startups. And then solve it together. In this way, we are not only helping PwC's clients, but also our start-ups, which in turn gain new clients or new product-market combinations."
MedTech
MedTech and meaningful care
MedTech is a good example of YES!Delft and PwC looking at how they can connect each other's networks and ecosystems. Edwin van Wijngaarden: "We support a health insurer with a meaningful care programme. We want to improve the quality of care in the Netherlands. That doesn't always mean more care, but more appropriate care. Innovations such as e-health solutions or solutions that simplify certain analyses are also part of this. It would be really good if you could link certain startups within YES!Delft with an interesting technology to that programme. These startups are provided with a platform, as it were, on which they can test their idea in practice. At the same time, it helps us in turn to support in that meaningful care ambition."
"We can contribute our specific knowledge", Noor Sanders adds, "and give masterclasses to startups, for example on how the healthcare system works in the Netherlands. If we can make the right connections in each other's networks, we can initiate or accelerate certain transitions and contribute positively to the themes on which we want to make a difference to each other."
Largest AI community in the Netherlands
"MedTech offers great opportunities", concludes Evert Jaap Lugt. "We have many engineers here from the faculty of clinical technology with good ideas. With the largest university hospital – Erasmus MC – just a few kilometres away, that offers enormous opportunities. Imagine that we can apply robotics process automation solutions with scripts and algorithms based on artificial intelligence to many challenges. At Delft University of Technology, 25,000 people are studying who have to learn the Python programming language. We are talking here about the largest AI community in the Netherlands, which can also become active in the field of medicine. If we can come up with very clear solutions to specific problems faced by PwC clients, then we'll make an impact together and this will undoubtedly be a successful partnership."
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