I recently held an AMA on corporate innovation with Cory Hooyman, lead innovation manager at Target.

We talked about corporate innovation and how to bring new practices and methods into your team and company.

From the Target perspective, what blind spots do startups have in pursuing a pilot, and how should they make a pilot successful and convert that to a larger rollout?

Cory: First and foremost, a blind spot is not understanding what their partners are thinking about and what they’re concerned about.

We have a lot of people that come into Target not truly knowing what the team they’re working with is trying to accomplish. I’m not just saying with the partnership, but as whole. What are their goals? What are their current resources? Do they even have money?

If you understand as a startup what the person across from you is concerned about, you can make your pilot work for you in showcasing the numbers or successes that matter to that person.

Another huge blind spot is usually based upon traction. So, those companies that are able to hand hold the corporation, if you will, and there’s a lot of work up front. It’s going to be a lot of work because you feel like you have to baby somebody. But these people – when I say these people I mean corporate teams – are used to working with people like Bain or McKinsey or, again, IBM or P&G.

They aren’t used to somebody who can pivot as quickly as a startup can. They aren’t used to somebody who’s as smart as people who are driving startups. You, as a startup, can utilize that to your advantage – showcase how you incorporated their feedback. “By the way, we pushed a product yesterday. Look at that. It’s good to go.” We can partner with you to collaborate and build together. That’s a good thing.

As I mentioned, the number one thing would be to understand what they care about, and then also the advantages that you bring to the table that others don’t.

Ryan: The other thing that startups have a problem with is going into these relationships with happy ears of saying, “I talked with the VP of my product category. He says that this is cool.”

Basically, what that person was saying is that they think it was great, or your idea is interesting. It has nothing to do with the fact that they actually want to partner with you, that they actually have the budget, or that this is actually aligned with something that they want.

You have to go to that next level. What are your priorities? What are your priorities this year and next year? What are your bonuses tied to? What are those things that are motivating you? Try to get your startup aligned with that. That might take some tweaking of the product. It might be finding the business unit that your product actually helps them with. The sooner you can find out what is motivating them and turn off your happy ears and actually get into the real commitments of timelines, piloting phases, and budgeting, then the more likely it is to happen.

The last thing we want – many startups have been killed this way and it’s dual fault from corporations – the startups get happy ears. They go fundraise, build out a product for the next six months, and then go back to that same person who said that their product was cool and they are still saying that’s cool. That doesn’t actually go to that next level of a partnership or full scale blowout.

I recently held an AMA on corporate innovation with Cory Hooyman, lead innovation manager at Target.

We talked about corporate innovation and how to bring new practices and methods into your team and company.

Is there one thing that startup founders need to know to best interact with large corporations?

Ryan: The nice thing about our program in particular – especially when we’re working with a large corporation or retailer – is that there’s a massive gap between the corporations and the startups. It’s on both sides of it.

The startups, in a lot of cases, do not interact with an enterprise level corporation because they don’t speak the language. The timelines are off. A lot of the time, the professionalism of the startup needs to improve in order for them to interact with these very large organizations.

On the flip side, the corporations – and Target has done an amazing job of this – admit where they need to improve in order to interact with the startups. Not everything is going to be at the level of a huge consulting firm or a massive software company when it’s just three or four people who are iterating an idea.

When we look through the companies during the application process, we always try to project the potential of that team in their ability to work with the enterprise level companies. Just because they don’t know how to speak that language right now doesn’t mean we can’t work with that and hopefully get them to a level where they’d be able to actually interact with a 10,000 person company or 300,000 person company. That’s a big thing for us.

When we talk about team, team, team for the participants in the program, clearly, it’s about the entrepreneurial skillsets and the stuff that we identify as Techstars as an organization. But for companies that are trying to work with massive corporations, we also have to think about the potential of that team, their ability to interact with those large corporations.

Techstars sits right in the middle, between the startups on the one side of it and the corporations on the other. We plant ourselves right down the middle and try to be the middle ground between the two of them so they can hopefully speak the same language.

Cory: There are certain things that founders should watch out for. If the time is not right, the corporate yuckery can take place. They can in some way, shape, or form drown your company by not being aware of some of the things that Ryan mentioned, like the gaps.

I’ve talked to people who have, not through this program, but I’ve talked to companies locally who are on their (and I am not exaggerating this number) 28th, 29th or 30th meeting with Target. They’re still hoping for a pilot. People get passed around to various people in the organization with the intent of maybe this person might be somebody good to talk to.

Really, the only reason they keep getting passed around is because nobody has any money to do what these people are trying to accomplish. If you knew that up front, you might be like, “I’ve had my fifth meeting. I get it. I’m out. I’m going to go focus on something else.”

But because people don’t want to tell you they don’t have access to these resources, they just pass you along with the hopes that somebody else can deal with it.