In-company project: corporate innovation within a national postal company with almost 500 years

• Autor(a) principal: Tavares, Ricardo Filipe Samora
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/18600
• topic: Innovation; Corporate innovation; Cultural innovation; Startups; Service design thinking; CTT - Correios de Portugal; Gestão de empresas; Startup; Ecossistema; Inovação; Trabalho de projeto; Portugal

The main purpose of this project is to understand how companies can build an efficient relationship model with the startup ecosystem through corporate innovation by following a service design thinking model. In this case, the model will be applied to CTT – Correios de Portugal, the unique startup created in Portugal with almost 500 years of existence and recognized internationally for the quality of the service provided and for the innovative character, having won a few awards during the years, such as Excellence Brand of 2018 and Trusted Brand of 2018, both awarded by Superbrands. Porter (1992) argue that corporate innovation it is a success factor that contributes to competitive advantage. In a sector that is facing numerous challenges, such as dematerialization and digitalization of services, which contributes to the decrease of mail that, according this CTT’s Annual Report from 2017, is still the service that underwrites the most for CTT’s operating income (71%), CTT seeks to find scale up solution to reinvent its business in order to optimize their processes and minimize costs. Although corporate innovation faces serious financial constraints (Hsu et al., 2014; Cornaggia et al., 2015) startups can be the missing piece to find scale up solutions. Typically, a startups ecosystem has the agility that corporate companies don’t have – from one side corporate companies have resources, scale and implemented process while startups, usually, have the willingness to take risks and the will to have a rapid growth. (Weiblen & Chesbrough, 2015). This relationship is proven, through a study conducted by Gust (a platform for provision and management of investments) named “European Accelerator Report 2016”, which affirms that there is a trend of acceleration programs with startups in Europe. As the same study mention, this trend could be justified, in one hand, because companies are beginning to discover that accelerators are an efficient and effective way to increase engagement with startups and, on the other hand because companies, typically, have limited skills which increases the demand of outsourcing services. At last, this study takes in consideration, a study, from CTT, conducted to 47 postal operators and 25 Portuguese’s companies, that already have built a relationship model with the startup ecosystem, aiming to get information and knowledge about how international postal companies and Portuguese companies, from different sectors, are building their relationship with startups ecosystem; and additionally, a survey, from CTT, sent to a data base of 500 startups, with a sample of 47 answers, to better understand their needs in the decision-making process of a potential business partner. These studies will help finding and tuning a proper solution for CTT, aligned with not only CTT’s main objectives and return goals but also with startups needs. Hence, this project aims to find and propose an implementation plan for a new relationship model with startups for CTT, expressing the key elements for the success of the solution and the estimated costs and potential returns.