Bain & Company Digital strikes alliance with CrunchBase
Consulting firm Bain & Company has struck an alliance with CrunchBase, a platform dubbed the Wikipedia for information on corporates and small businesses around the world. The partnership focuses on providing organisations with state of the art investment insights, in particular in the digital domain, through the combination of CrunchBase's wide array of data with Bain’s analytical rigour.
Against a backdrop of a rapidly changing business environment, innovation is more than ever emerging as a key strategic priority, and as a result the topic nowadays finds itself at the top of corporate agenda’s. According to data from Strategy&, global spending on research & development – a key explanatory factor for innovation – last year reached $680 billion, an all-time high. At the same time, the competitive edge of innovation is changing, with focus increasingly shifting to among others co-creation, collaboration across value chains and corporate venturing into innovative breeding grounds, such as startup communities.
One of the major areas that fosters today’s innovation agenda’s is digital – across industries digital and online is transforming business and operating models and consumer expectations. Yet with so many digital widespread trends surfacing all over the globe, companies willing to venture into the domain are struggling with finding the right targets. “Often companies lack the fact base required to focus their innovation efforts and investments on the most critical digital trends,” says Elizabeth Spaulding, Partner at Bain & Company in San Francisco and head of the firm’s Digital practice.
To help executives with finding the cream of the crop, Bain & Company has decided to strike a partnership with CrunchBase – the globe’s most widely used database of funding information. With the move, Bain aims to draw on the wealth of data available to develop insights that help companies pinpoint where new innovations are being developed and funded, which will in turn help them better define potential targets or threats. “This partnership brings together the best of two worlds to benefit our clients, many of whom are overwhelmed, or simply a step behind, in recognising the digital transformations taking place in their industries,” comments Spaulding. According to her, the alliance will create the “foundation and fact base to help businesses determine what technology trends may be getting early traction that could create value for their business.”
Jager McConnell, CEO of CrunchBase, says he is “excited” about the opportunity to partner with Bain, adding “Now more than ever, we think it's critical that companies can draw insights from data so they can make smart decisions for their business and stay ahead of the competition.”
The portfolio of services stemming from the partnership will focus on corporates and private equity firms, as well as start-ups with the potential to significantly scale-up.
Recent research from KPMG shows that venture capital globally flowing towards startups has jumped to $128 billion in 2015.
