50 Ways to Engage with Startups (that you’re probably not using)

What Corporate Innovation Gets Wrong — And How to Fix It

On June 5th, I had the honour of delivering a keynote at the Belgium Startup Awards, a landmark event celebrating the country’s most promising startup talent and the ecosystem that supports it. Speaking to an audience of corporate innovation leaders, entrepreneurs, and ecosystem builders, I addressed a growing concern: why corporate-startup collaborations still underdeliver — despite everyone’s best intentions.

In my talk, “From CVC to Porosity: The End of the Outside-In Innovation,” I challenged the outdated playbook most corporates still use when engaging startups: CVC, accelerators, hackathons, and PoCs. These models aren’t wrong — but they represent just a tiny fraction of the 50+ engagement models available today. More importantly, they often preserve the illusion of openness while maintaining control and silos.

I introduced porosity as a new principle for corporate venturing — a mindset and design approach where innovation flows both ways: from startup to corporate and back. Through real-world examples and a three-layer framework (human, process, strategic), I showed how leaders can move from innovation theatre to transformation. The session also previewed my Corporate Venturing Canvas, a practical tool to align strategy with startup collaboration methods.

The message landed clearly: The future doesn’t want to be sponsored. It wants to be invited in.

If you'd like to explore this keynote for your next leadership event or corporate offsite, feel free to get in touch. And if you're curious about the 50 engagement models I mentioned, they’re all in my book Corporate Venturing, a Framework — available here.