Progressive thinking in the corporate world has been shaping what it means to grow. As many have written and analyzed, intelligent growth is no longer about just short-term stock price.
Corporations need to adopt an intelligent growth model that balances long-term vitality with performance above the industry average. They need efficiency in the short-term while also being able to fund initiatives long-term. Understanding the importance of instilling a collaborative and agile mindset inside their organization to tackle the challenges their enterprises face is also key.
Intelligent growth is a complex endeavor, so I will start by focusing on one aspect of it: startup engagement.
STARTUP ENGAGEMENT
In my view, at the core notion of intelligent growth lies the relentless pursuit of customer experience innovation.
Mine is not a new perspective, and many have long advocated it as the most reliable way to grow and sustain a corporation. Proper engagement with the global startup community can make significant contributions to this journey.
With startup engagement, we often concentrate on finding the next shiny object in a particular industry, the next revolutionary idea to sell. Although this is important, equally, if not more important is finding emerging solutions by the global startup ecosystem targeting the entire customer experience process.
In other words, we need a more holistic perspective. Excellence in the customer experience drives long-term loyalty, allowing corporations to retain customers, even in times of recession.
Why Startups Succeed with the Customer Experience
Startups are particularly skillful in solving customer experience challenges in collaboration with large enterprises. Their flexibility in developing disruptive solutions and efficiency make startups ideal partners.
Corporations with clear strategic intent and expectations have repeatedly showcased the benefits of working with startups. These partnerships have yielded new business models, new products, and new services in collaboration with them.
One common trait of these successful collaborations is the establishment of long-term, repeatable, and transparent processes. These steps may look costly at first. However, a haphazard or light-touch approach to this process can also be very expensive (see this example).
Several corporations have written off early investments too late and at too high a cost.
Through our collaborative engagement framework, our programs concentrate on domains that are critical to the future. Our focus is on early startup engagement and working with Sente Foundry provides corporations with access to global innovation ecosystems. We give our partners the ability to take advantage of our due diligence process and investment efficiencies we developed and refined over the years. 
That is intelligent growth.