Heartland Mobile Council’s Solution to Corporate Pitch Competitions

The concept of innovation has been completely altered in recent years. Our stereotypical story involving a man and his garage no longer holds true. Now, anyone can be an innovator. However, Corporate America continues to struggle in creating innovators. Their solution to this issue: pitch competitions. But are pitch competitions enough?

Those at Heartland Mobile Council realized that pitch competitions alone would not address the problem as the average startup’s pitch is intended for venture capitalists. But in corporate pitch competitions, when the audience is a corporate brand, startups struggle to effectively convey their pitch as values and priorities of the two audiences vary greatly.

So, Heartland Mobile Council came up with a modified solution: The Brands+Startups Challenge. The program connects large corporate brands and startups, while providing startups with mentoring/coaching. Similar to “The Voice,” corporate brands press a button, turning their chairs around for the startup whose pitch they were most impressed with, resulting in their coaching the startup through four challenge rounds. The Brands+Startups Challenge kicks off on June 26 at Chicago Techweek and is open to the public.

In addition to participating in the program, some of the brands including Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois, Orbitz, PepsiCo, and Walgreens sent in their best and worst startup pitch stories. Here are some of our favorites:

Best: “Let’s Talk…Directly to My Consumer”

I was talking with a beacon technology startup that gave consumers offers right in front of the shelf. It’s a fantastic opportunity to target the consumer at the point of decision, the Zero Moment of Truth [Google’s ZMOT]

Worst: “Europe is Great, But We’re in America”

We’ve had a lot of people come in to present their capabilities. One guy presented a couple weeks ago and they had a very small base in the U.S. so it didn’t make sense to partner with them. They’re big in Europe but not in the U.S. They were just starting so it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. From our perspective, it didn’t have a big enough reach for our domestic consumer.

To learn more, see Heartland Mobile’s original post here.