Speed

Introduction

Large companies know that part of their next competitive advantage lies outside their walls, in startups able to solve a specific problem better and faster than they could internally. The obstacle appears at the moment of hiring them. Procurement and vendor onboarding processes are built for large, stable partners: extensive due diligence, administrative requirements, approval cycles that take several months. Applying that machinery to a low-budget pilot with a startup is disproportionate, and it almost always ends up killing the opportunity before it starts.

Speed was created to resolve that contradiction: to give corporations a hiring path designed for innovation, agile and low-cost, without giving up the order and control any procurement department requires. On the startup side, it opens the door to working with a corporation without going through the traditional vendor maze.

The problem

Hiring a startup for a proof of concept triggers a process designed for a different scale. Finding relevant candidates depends on personal networks and manual searches. Comparing them means gathering scattered information with no consistent criteria. And once a startup is chosen, the pilot moves forward split across spreadsheets, emails and meetings where no one has the full picture: how much budget has been spent, what stage it is in, what was committed and what was delivered.

Delay brings another cost with it. Without a shared record, the area that approves the investment has no visibility into progress, and each new hire starts almost from zero, because what was learned in the previous one, which startup responded well to which kind of challenge, is never written down. The process ends up slow, expensive and hard to audit, the exact opposite of what open innovation should make possible.

The solution

We designed and built Speed around the real path of an innovation hire: from the challenge to the proof of concept, with selection and follow-up inside the same environment. The platform is organized into four connected pieces that cover that cycle end to end.

At its base is a library of curated startups, each with its value proposition and company data, fed by individual sign-ups and bulk uploads. On top of that base, the corporation writes up its challenge and the platform suggests the startups with the best fit, so sourcing no longer depends on who knows whom. Once a candidate is selected, the project moves to a board that manages stages, budget spent, owners, milestones and KPIs, where the status of the pilot can be read at a glance instead of being pieced together at every meeting. At the close, a multi-criteria rating module lets the corporation evaluate the startup it worked with, and that evaluation flows back into the system to sharpen the next recommendations.

That final loop is what sets Speed apart from a vendor directory or a generic task manager: beyond organizing the hiring process, the platform learns from it. Each evaluation improves the quality of the next match. Around that core, Speed covers the full operation with program metrics dashboards, roles and permissions by user type, separate environments for each organization and a content academy to support the teams.

Results

• From months to weeks. The full cycle, from challenge to contracted pilot, lives in a single environment, without the vendor onboarding process that stalls projects before they start.

• Sourcing that is structured and repeatable. Fit-based startup suggestions replace the reliance on personal contacts and turn a handcrafted task into a systematic one.

• An auditable hiring process. Budget spent, stages, milestones and KPIs are recorded and visible, so whoever approves the investment can follow progress without having to ask for it.

• A process that learns. Multi-criteria ratings feed back into the recommendations: each pilot leaves the organization better prepared to hire the next startup.

Conclusion

A generic tool would have forced the hiring process to be split across a directory, a spreadsheet and a task manager, losing the traceability the process needs at every handoff. Building Speed to measure made the opposite possible: sourcing, selection, follow-up and learning live within a single logic, designed so that hiring innovation is as agile as innovation itself. The software is the evidence that we understood the business.