The Rich Robinson Show - Season 1 - At the Speed of China

Shameen Prasantham on How Chinese startups learned to dance with gorilla businesses

Share episode

Shameen Prashantham is an Author and a well-known International Business Strategy Professor at CBEIS (China Europe International Business School).

In this episode, Shameen shares his journey in researching and teaching. He also shared some anecdotes from his published book, "Gorillas Can Dance."


Key Takeaway:
• Scotland has a large number of small entrepreneurial firms.
• CEIBS (China Europe International Business School) is a joint venture of the EU and Shanghai Corporation.
• BizSpark is a Microsoft program that provides Microsoft product software for free to startups.
• Shanghai is very interested in engaging with start-ups.
• Walmart China introduced the "Omega Eight Program" to Chinese startups to give them the opportunity to sell their products across Walmart’s 400 stores.

Best Moments:
• Shameen shares that his friends tease him that he has bad timing.
"And some of my friends in the UK were saying, "Mate, you got this timing completely wrong. You hung around here while we were suffering with the financial crisis, and you went there just in time for the slowdown." But what we know now, which I didn't know. Then, that was also the year WeChat was introduced?"
[00:09:33.9-00:09:50.8]

• Rich jokingly asked Shameen if they were talking about the book or Rich’s first marriage.
"Are we talking about my first marriage? Or are we talking about your book? I'm sorry" [00:18:58.6-00:19:01.7]


Post-production, transcript, and show notes by XCD Virtual Assistants

Rich Robinson:

So as we were talking about, that title it's just fantastic."Gorillas Can Dance" like a really solid business book with such a fun title. Thank you so much for coming on the pod, a renowned professor. I've heard his name from so many different channels in China, CEIBS Business School. And joining us in the prod, thank you so much, Shameen, for coming on.

Shameen Prasantham:

Thank you, Rich. It's a real pleasure to join you on this podcast. Likewise, I've heard so much about you, and this podcast has got so much traction so it's a real honor to be on it.

Rich Robinson:

Yeah, your new book is called " Gorillas Can Dance." So, let's dance a little bit, and before we dance about this topic, take us back to your journey to Shanghai, how you ended up there, and like what you've been studying along the way. And then let's lead up to that, and we can really dive deeper into the book.

Shameen Prasantham:

Super. Yeah. So, I'm originally from India, born to an Indian father and a part-Portuguese Sri Lankan mother. And before I turned one, we lived in the United States for some time. My parents were at grad school. And basically, my dad, who's still alive continues to be heavily involved in an NGO that focuses on counseling, psychological counseling. And so, at this point in time, is actually kept very busy. Unfortunately, he's still going, just completed 50 years at that NGO in the summer. But eventually I ended up in Scotland, and that's where a lot of my ideas around corporations partnering with start-up developed. So, Scotland is a very interesting context in the sense that there are a large number of small entrepreneurial firms. It has a very strong tradition of engineering and so on. But it also has a bunch of multinational subsidiaries that set up shop. Some of them as long ago as the 1950s, in the period after the second world when Europe was rebuilding and American companies started moving over to Europe, using the UK as a beachhead. So many of them the commercial offices were down in London, but the manufacturing facilities were up in Scotland, where you had a qualified workforce, but it was, in relative terms, less expensive. And by 90's, I was sort of in the mix, and I was lucky enough to be part of an international business unit at Strathclyde University run by two eminent international business professors, Neil Hood and Stephen Young. They had spent decades by then looking at these big multinational companies operating there. But then there was also this emergence of a new phenomenon of smaller companies going international. And a lot of doctoral students were looking at that. I sort of was maybe number six or seven in a line of doctoral students. And eventually, I began to ask the question, "Why are we looking at these two phenomena in parallel? The big companies, on the one hand, the small companies in the other." And as it happened, at that moment, Neil Hood, who had two hats. He was an academic on the one hand, but also a policy maker. He was Deputy Chairman of Scottish Enterprise. He said, "Funny you should say that because we are seeing these American companies that originally came to do manufacturing. Now under a lot of pressure because they can't compete with Central and Eastern Europe and certainly not with China. They want to up their game and innovate more. And we've always had these smaller companies that have been innovative but want to scale up, and we're actually trying to help them come together." And so that was just a very unique opportunity for me to observe that phenomenon. And that summer, I went to a conference in America, the Academic Conference, and asked another very eminent strategy professor, "What do you think about this possibility that small companies and large companies might work together?" So by now, this is 2006, 15 years ago. And he said, "Well, I don't think small companies have a choice. They need to learn to dance with the big gorilla." And that's what gave rise to this idea of "dancing with gorillas." And a couple of years later, I had an article in California Management Review with Julian Birkinshaw of London Business School. And then, over time, I was in Scotland, and it was great to be in the west and observe what was happening in the US. But I also became aware that there was so much happening in Asia, in emerging economies. And so in 2011, 10 years ago, I joined Nottingham University's campus in Ningbo, and then 6 years ago, moved over to CEIBS in Shanghai in 2015. And so, I've been very lucky to observe this phenomenon of big companies and startups partnering over a period of time and in different parts of the world.

Rich Robinson:

Excellent. Wow. Very nicely laid out journey to what your expertise has been built around and what you've just written. Tell some of the listeners about CEIBS and that school and what the acronym stands for, and what's the secret sauce behind that esteemed institution.

Shameen Prasantham:

Right, so CEIBS stands for China Europe International Business School; it was founded in 1944 as a joint venture of the European Union and the Shanghai Municipal Corporation. And so really, it is two government entities coming together to create this business school. And with the Chinese economy having opened up in the late 70's, there was actually a pent-up demand for managerial talent. And this was a place that, from the beginning, aspired to have a very high quality MBA program. And initially there were professors flying in from the west, and then subsequently, over time Chinese-origin professors were trained in the US typically made their way to HongKong. And then we're seeing this very interesting school developing. And so in a very short period of time — less than 3 decades — it sort of developed a global reputation. The full-time MBA Program has been ranked in the top 10 by the Financial Times for the last 4 years. The Global EMB program is ranked No. 2 worldwide. But we have a very big Chinese EMBA Program as well. And I would say the alumni from that has just been a tremendous resource. And just to contrast management education in China with how it is in India, for example. The Indian economy opened - in 1991, over a decade after China's did. But the first business school was set up in the 1960s. Indian Institute of Management, in collaboration with Harvard Business School. And a few developed like that before 1991 were very prominent. And so, in a sense, you had an oversupply of managerial talent and an economy that hadn't quite opened up and liberalized, whereas here was the other way around. And I think CEIBS has just grown with the economy, and I think has that unique characteristic of among Chinese business schools being very international and among its global peers, having this specialism in China.

Rich Robinson:

Thanks for sharing. Yeah, interesting. Contrasting it, back to India. It's really been fascinating to watch, especially in the last decade of how many kickass Indian executives and entrepreneurs have really dominated the US business landscape, right? I'm such a big fan of Satya on what he's done with Microsoft could have easily gone the way of the dinosaur and it's really become this very innovative, very nimble, fascinating company, and of course, at Google and Coke and so on, right? So I hadn't really thought of that the management schools have been around and the business culture and the internationalization of business from India that's really informed what's happened in the US. Interesting. And yeah, tell me about the experience of teaching in China, Ningbo, Shanghai versus Nottingham versus Scotland versus, you know, others.

Shameen Prasantham:

Well, I mean, I think it's a privilege to be in the line of work I am. I've just enjoyed both the research and teaching sites from the beginning, but there's a big contrast. I remember noticing how quiet the campus was on a Saturday night in Ningbo, whereas in Glasgow at the same time of the week, it's mayhem in certainly downtown. So I thought that was one of the first things I observed. And So these are very different audiences in Ningbo and Shanghai. In Ningbo, there's a big undergraduate program and also a few master's programs for people pre-experience masters. And so these were typically younger students. I would teach them in year four in Ningbo, the undergrad students. I found them very bright, very hardworking. In Shanghai, at CEIBS, the full-time MBA program is our youngest cohort; the average age is 29. So these are sort of older students, but then we have even older part-time students who come in on the executive MBA Programs, and so moving to Shanghai and engaging with people with more experience was also great. And coming here in 2015, I think I just got very lucky. So I arrived in Ningbo in 2011, right after the GDP growth rate of China had dipped noticeably. And this was, I think, partly because the stimulus that had been unleashed during the financial crisis was now being reigned back. And some of my friends in the UK were saying, "Mate, you got this timing completely wrong. You hung around here while we were suffering with the financial crisis, and you went there just in time for the slowdown." But what we know now, which I didn't know. Then, that was also the year weChat was introduced?

Rich Robinson:

Yes. Yes.

Shameen Prasantham:

Yeah, but I think it was also, yeah, the beginning of the new chapter, the rise of Mobile 2015, right after Premier Li Keqiang announced mass innovation, mass entrepreneurship in 2014, and I arrived in a city where I think the presence of multinational companies as one of its defining characteristics in terms of the business landscape. And so, while it doesn't quite have the entrepreneurial ecosystem of a Beijing, or Shenzhen, or even Huangzho in a way, what they did have was the opportunity to facilitate large multinationals engaging with entrepreneurship. And I couldn't have asked for a better venue in a sense, continue observing the phenomenon that I had been.

Rich Robinson:

Indeed. Yeah. What a fantastic playground for you in some ways, right? Because, if you're going to really talk about, " Gorillas Can Dance." Yeah. You've got to really work with the gorillas because everybody else will come. Right. It's kind of like a dating app. You've got to seat it with females, and then all the males will follow, right? And if you're going to talk about corporations, you don't get a bunch of startups and wait for the corporations to show up, it's the other way around. So, wow, fascinating. I love it. And tell me a little bit about some of the anecdotes and some of the things that you've experienced talking to multinationals in China and startups, like the trials and tribulations, and triumphs of those relationships.

Shameen Prasantham:

Sure. So, let me start with Microsoft, which in many ways is the lead case in my book, simply because it's the company I've studied the longest. And, you mentioned Satya, so over 15 years ago the first company that I was getting a feel outside of Scotland in terms of showing some interest in engaging with startups was Microsoft. And that was serendipity, the way I was able to connect with them. But then I stayed in touch and kept observing what they were doing. And in 2008, they introduced this startup partnering program called"BizSpark," which was a way, an attempt to give away free software to combat the open software movement because they wanted startups to build continue to build stuff on their platform. And then this was followed by a more elite invitation-by-invitation-only program for the hundred most innovative of these 30,000 BizSpark members. And I remember going to what they call the"BizSpark One Summit" in Mountain View. I was still in Scotland at the time, so I went across the Atlantic. And it was striking that almost all the startups in the room were North American or Western European. There were many Asians based in Silicon Valley who were running those start-ups. But there wasn't a single Chinese startup there. And there was maybe one Indian startup, I had flown over from Bangalore. But what also happened shortly after that, so this was 2010. In 2011, I went to the worldwide partner conference of Microsoft in LA. 15,000 people come coming together. And some of those startups from BizSpark One were being showcased there, and this newly appointed president of the server and business tools division stands up and gives a speech about how he thinks cloud computing was going to be important. And this meant that the startups that they begun to be engaging with became all the more important because cloud computing was sort of perfect for the startups who didn't want to invest a lot in infrastructure. And that was, of course, Satya Nadella. And so by the time I had come to arrived in Shanghai, Satya had actually already taken over as CEO, and what was interesting to observe was that partnering with startups was not peripheral for these for a company like this; it was becoming more and more mainstream and connected to the core strategy. And what had also happened in that period between that speech he made in 2011 and my getting to Shanghai in 2015 was a very interesting develop development that was triggered from Israel so the guys in Microsoft Israel, when they heard about the BizSpark One Start-up Initiative started, directing some of their startups to participate. And at one point, I think the largest number of startups from any single country outside of the west, was from Israel. But they said, "Well, let's take things one step further." And in 2012, corporate accelerator for startups in Tel Aviv, in their R&D center and sort of inspired their colleagues in Beijing. There's an R&D center in Zhang Wan Sen, and their colleagues in the R&D center in Bangalore to do likewise. And so in 2012, the first Microsoft accelerators were opened in Israel, India, and China. And only in the couple of years after that in the west. And so this was a complete reversal. When I'd gone to Mountain View just a couple of years before 2012, it was mainly Western startups, but by the time I came to Shanghai, it was very clear that they were very interested in engaging with startups in the emerging markets as well. So that was something that has been very interesting to observe. That large multinationals have the opportunity to play in different playgrounds and can tap into this entrepreneurial talent the other thing that I'd like to mention is that after I came to Shanghai, when I made my first presentation based on this research that had been developing over some time, the people that came and spoke to me afterward were people from automotive multinationals, banking companies, and so on. And I began to observe a shift, whereby now traditional companies were also beginning to engage with startups. And one of the companies that I came to know was BMW, who had launched a BMW Startup Garage Program in 2015 in Munich. And eventually I went over to Munich, and I met Gregor Gimmy, who was one of the co-founders of this program. He was originally from Germany, spent time in Silicon Valley, including an idea, came back to Germany, joined BMW, and ended up helping kickstart this program. And we were sitting in this really funky corporate accelerator type room. And I complimented him on it, and he said,"Oh, all this design and everything." I just went ahead and did it without getting approval from the corporate and identity department. And he said, "Even the website. We went ahead and did this because if you did it the usual way you would have a banner right on the top where you could click on and you could buy a BMW car. That's how apparently all the BMW websites were." And he said, "That wouldn't work for a startup audience." And he said the day after this was launched, he got a phone call from Corporate and Identity, and he thought he was in trouble, but in fact they called to congratulate him for a cool website. And so this point was--

Rich Robinson:

rather than permission. Yes.

Shameen Prasantham:

That was exactly what he said. He said, "What I'd learned in Silicon Valley was you asked for forgiveness not permission." That's exactly it. So, I think it's been very interesting to observe, over time and in different places, companies trying to figure this out. And my point with both the Microsoft and the BMW examples is that it's not been easy; it's not necessarily happened overnight. But, you know, it's been very interesting that companies have recognized that they don't need to do everything they can tap into entrepreneurial energy and talent that's outside the boundaries of their organizations.

Rich Robinson:

Wonderful. Thanks for sharing. Yeah. I mean, at face value startup don't have any brand equity, or really any users, or really many resources when they start out. And large organizations have plenty of users, brand equity, and resources, but they're slow not very nimble, and not necessarily thinking innovatively. And startups are fast, nimble, and are always thinking of core principles and first principles. So it should work together. But I think I've seen so many examples of innovation theater or just a dog and pony show to check the boxes. But I think it's really starting to happen now. And what are some of the examples that you can share where you know, 1+1= 11.

Shameen Prasantham:

You are just so absolutely right. On paper sounds like a perfect math. Each side has something the other wants. One has scale; the other has agility. Yet in reality, it's a challenge, and in fact, that's one of the key things I talk about in the book. This what I call "The Paradox of Asymmetry," the very differences that make these companies attracted to each other make it difficult to work together, or at least not straight through.

Rich Robinson:

Are we talking about my first marriage? Or are we talking about your book? I'm sorry

Shameen Prasantham:

So, I think, the key and the companies that have done this well, better than others, because, as you very rightly said although it appears that, many gorillas have been attempting to dance, learning to dance, some of them have taken it more seriously than others. And the ones that have taken it seriously have consciously or unconsciously, I think, unpacked what these asymmetries are and sought to address these. And so I identified 3 different asymmetries. The first is "The Asymmetry of Goals." Big and small companies want somewhat different things and at different time scales. The second is "The Asymmetry of Structure," which is perhaps the most obvious. Much, much larger multi-layered versus these small flat organizations. How do you find role counterparts between the two? And then there is what I call "The Asymmetry of Attention," the big company sees a sea of startups out there and they don't know which startups are worthy of their attention, or their limited managerial attention. The startups know who the big companies are, but they struggle to know whose attention within the big company to gain. Because I've seen some start-ups with 3 to even 6 months just going from pillar to post, trying to find the right individuals to connect with. And so, the companies that have done this well, I think have sort of clarified what the synergy is to address that asymmetry of goals, have created interfaces to deal with the structural problem and provide a first port of call for the startups, and have also very actively cultivated exemplas or success stories so people can see where the attention should go. Now, if you think of these interfaces, I've identified two broad types one that I call "Cohorts" and the other that I call "Funnel." Cohorts are like an MBA class. Getting in is difficult, but once you get in, unless you screw up, you will finish the time-bound program. But the interaction with peers is very important and I think that's what the corporate accelerator model has been. It's been sort of bringing together a cohort of startups for three to four years. And here, it's impossible not to mention Microsoft again. I think they have done this with a lot of diligence and effort to try to make this work. But there have been other interesting corporate accelerators, including ones that have engaged with third parties. So the Barclays Accelerator in London and New York, working with Techstars, has been an interesting example of this. The other is what I call "Funnels," where startups get screened in order to find a small set of startups that can contribute to the objectives of the company, a bit like the job search process after the MBA, you may not even know who else is involved. And BMW's Startup Garage has been along those lines; they may want to improve cyber security, for example, or autonomous driving, and then they make startups and end up working with a handful. So, Unilever Foundry is another company that had developed a funnel based approach. And what's interesting is many of these companies now do things in the West, as well as in emerging markets and have developed. It discovered that there are certain unique opportunities here in emerging economies, and have sought to tap into great entrepreneurial talent that you've talked about in many of your podcasts and writings as well.

Rich Robinson:

And do you have any examples of something that's happened specifically in China? I know that you broadly look at global companies.

Shameen Prasantham:

Yeah, so, you know, one of the high moments in my research journey came in April 2019, when I was brought into a room to talk about my research very briefly as the opening piece in a 90-minute session, and sitting in the audience was Doug McMillan, CEO of Walmart. So, on this very brief visit that he had in China, the Walmart China team decided that it was worth him spending 90-minutes of his time learning about something called the "Omega Eight Program" that Walmart China had introduced to engage with Chinese startups. And so after my talk, there were three startups that demoed what they were doing, and so on. And I thought these were great examples. One of the hassles that pin points in a supermarket is when you're trying to buy loose vegetables or fruit. You have to put it in a plastic dice, plastic bag then get in a line, wait for an IE to put it on weighing scales. And then when you're waiting in line, someone cuts the line noise that hell out of the way.

Rich Robinson:

That was my ex-mother-in-law that cut you by the way. I just wanted to let you know.

Shameen Prasantham:

So, Walmart basically put this out as a sort of an innovation challenge, and this one startup from Shenzhen developed used image recognition technology. It's an AI startup to develop a one click solution, whereby when you put this plastic bag with vegetable of fruit on the weighing scale, four or five images come up of possibilities. And you press one, and then you get a little sticky bit of paper with the QR, the barcode, and you wrap it around your plastic bag.

Rich Robinson:

How much of our life have we liked?"Oh, sure. They don't know what number it is?" In every language, in where I live now, people are like, "It's really a Byzantine system." Where there's a three-digit code, and then you bring over some vegetable they've never seen before, and they're like, "I don't even know," right? That's brilliant.

Shameen Prasantham:

Right? And if it came up in Chinese characters, I wouldn't be able to read it because my can't read answer very well. So it would work even for me. And here was the really interesting thing, Walmart China, was so impressed by this that they shared this with their international colleagues. And of course, Doug McMillon himself got to see this in person. And they ended up using this Shenzhen-based startup's technology in the US to address a different pin point, which was in-store theft.

Rich Robinson:

Interesting. Leakage.

Shameen Prasantham:

And so to me, this was I thought a very interesting way of Western multinational tapping into a Chinese startup, not only to solve a local problem. but also leveraging, harnessing this back home as well.

Rich Robinson:

Wow. Excellent. Yeah. Really good example. And that's something; it's a true pin point, and it brings together a lot of like new technology and ideas and not necessarily something that's going to be homegrown. So, what's your position or like how does all of this sort of dancing with external partners, how does that work with some sort of internal innovation? Effort or ambitions in internally, like how what's the sort of, kind of optimal balance between those in your research?

Shameen Prasantham:

That's a great question because this is, in fact, one of the challenges open innovation more generally as Henry Chesbrough turns it, the notion that you can engage with outside parties, be the universities, other collaborators, or startups, is we have this problem of "The not invented here" syndrome and a resistance to things coming from the outside because it might seem like an indictment of the shortcomings on the inside. But I think more and more companies are recognizing that you need to have both. You can't be completely reliant on external innovation sources, but at the same time, you don't need to do everything inside. Obviously, there's some element of competition that's likely to happen as a result, but I think one of the advantages of engaging with startups on the outside is speed, which is one of the themes you emphasize greatly. So I've even heard of one company where there were a couple of internal guys who joined the entrepreneurship and they made some progress, but not as fast as they'd have liked. Quit the company. Develop their startup. And the original company they worked for eventually acquired the startup. So there is some advantage to be had with engaging with startups on the outside, and in fact, you don't want to strangle them or their speed. But on the other hand, they aren't going to be the solution to everything. And so, one interesting example I came across in Shanghai was, Entrepreneurship Program of Intel China, which was originally called "Ideas to Reality," and it's been rechristened "Growth X" to make clear that these internal teams of managers who get brought into this program are meant to come up with projects that use Intel technology that will help to grow their revenue. But one of the things that Kapil Kane, the director of Innovation.

Rich Robinson:

I know Kapil well. What a terrific guy. He's like perfectly suited to run that program. It's Grace. Yeah, I've seen your interview with him. Yeah, it's great.

Shameen Prasantham:

Right, so one of the interesting things Kapil discovered was with one project that they were looking for a business unit with an intel to adopt. It's occurred to him that a startup in Huangzhou which was into making smart doors would actually be a good fit. And by partnering with that startup, the product went to market in 3 months as opposed to 9 months which what it would've likely taken. And so going forward, they actually then started inviting external startups to join this growth X program. And I think the last time they did it, they must have had something like 10 or 12 internal teams but five external startups as well. And I thought that's a very interesting way t o cross-fertilize ideas from the outside and the

Rich Robinson:

Yeah. Interesting. And so Intel, of course, US-based corporation, long history, lots of success in China. Have you felt or smelt local Chinese multinationals, like their ability to be a little bit more fast or nimble or innovative or flexible versus international companies? Within the scope of your research, have any examples around that at all?

Shameen Prasantham:

So I have mainly focused on Western multinationals in my research, but it is clear that anywhere in the world if you are operating outside your home base it isn't that to move as fast because, you don't necessarily have all the decision making power. Over time I've seen Western multinational subsidiaries in China recognizing that you need to move quickly, give more autonomy. But nevertheless, there are some constraints. So no doubt. The local technology giants and many of them engage with startups, they'd have the ability to move very fast. But actually, I heard something very interesting from one Chinese startup entrepreneur who had lived in the west come back. In fact, not long after Mass Innovation, Mass Entrepreneurship was launched and he said, "The way I look at it, I need to dance with both sets of gorillas, or I need to dance with the Western gorillas and the Chinese dragons." But I think I'd much rather talk to Microsoft initially, and try and get it into their accelerator and get to a point where I feel strong enough to then start talking to the Chinese big boys. And I think one of the things that's very noticeable about Chinese large companies is the amount of investing. So I think there was a study that came out a couple of years ago that showed maybe 5% of the entire Silicon Valley VC funding sources came from corporates, but in China was something like 40%. And so to, have BAT as one of the investors, something that many entrepreneurs have feared or wanted, but else many have seen as inevitable. So definitely there's, I think, a very different sense in terms of what those Chinese companies have to offer than western ones, but from a startups point of view, I think in many cases it's been feasible to try and get the best of both worlds.

Rich Robinson:

Yeah. Very interesting. I think, yeah, when you're talking about BAT, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent. And then there's also, WAN and JD and ByteDance and, many others. I think both Alibaba and Tencent learned early on. Because those companies are actually kind of long in the tooth. They're both founded in the late 90's. They're almost a quarter of a century old. But they're still, much more nimble. A typical multinational and they're very aggressive in investing and making a lot of bets and just being at arm's length and just letting all these flowers bloom or not bloom. And in some ways they can be a king maker and say, "Ah, we're going to give our users and resource to you." And benign you in some ways. So maybe for them they're just doing their sort of like, innovation. They just kind of broadly know this industry's growing, and let's let's plant lot of seeds there and then we can do follow on rounds and then maybe acquire them. But I think, other multinationals is probably not quite as feasible to be so aggressive and also their DNA is not necessarily in consumer tech. So, Yeah. I it really is important to be able to do this dance. And what do you sort of hope from this book? Like, what do you think is really the sort of, end goal for corporations to really be able to internalize? Like, "This is a book both for large startups, but also a guidebook for some large multinationals, but also startups to be able to engage with them."

Shameen Prasantham:

Well, I would say that the primary audience is the large multinational managers in large corporations, the gorillas. And so there are lessons that can be learned from other gorillas that have sought to partner effectively with startups. But I would hope that startup entrepreneurs who do want to dance with gorillas will increase their odds of success by understanding better the perspective of the big gorillas and can adapt accordingly. So when I was talking about clarifying synergies, creating interfaces, and cultivating exemplars, if that's what these big companies are doing, then a startup wanting to partner with them should accordingly form, consolidate, and extend their relationship keeping these in mind. For the small startups, my advice has always been to take a two-fold approach on the one hand; be as proactive and put your best foot forward kind of thing. But on the other hand; be cautious, be careful. I think the, that expression Dancing with Gorillas resonated with so many because there's a hint of danger there. You can be careful or crushed. So to be honest the book is written to the managers of large corporations, but it can hopefully also be relevant to startups. And just to make a couple of points in terms of what I hope this will deliver. Now, on the one hand, I hope it will help to make collaborate more effective but also in a way that's entrepreneurial and keeping in mind a global perspective. And that last point is worth mentioning because globalization has sort of gone out of fashion. Entrepreneurship though is still very much seen as hot important. And I think that's right, and true, but I think still there is a place for a global mindset. A lot of these connections happen locally. But as I mentioned in the case of that Walmart illustration. If Walmart didn't have a global mindset, they wouldn't have engaged with a startup so far from home and they wouldn't have been open to the possibility that learning could be taken elsewhere. So these three mindsets the entrepreneurial mindset, the collaborative mindset, and a global mindset., I think if you sort of take a step back, applies well beyond corporates and startups working together. And where I think these minds can also make a difference is in terms of social impact. And that's the other thing that I hope will be one of the key things people will take away. And this came home to me because my school, CEIBS, has had a campus in Africa for over a decade. So 2015, when I joined CEIBS, it was a year after Mass Innovation, Mass Entrepreneurship so it was interesting from that point of view. But also September 2015 was when the United Nations adopted the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. And right after that I started engaging with Africa, our Africa campus, because I would go and teach regularly and then try and do some field work for my research while I was there. And in fact, one of the multinationals I came across engaging with entrepreneurs in Africa is Alibaba. One of my former students joined that their founders program where they, through which they were engaging with startups in various developing countries. And it occurred to me that many of the student projects that I was hearing, you know, ideas for new startups, social entrepreneurship was a redundant term, all entrepreneurship was social. They would say, "We don't have regular power supply." Hence this solar energy startup idea."We can't get loans easily." Hence, this microfinance startup idea. And so when corporates, including Microsoft and Alibaba were engaging with startups, that there was not only economic payoff, but also social impact, and the 2020s are meant to be the decade of action to help us accelerate the achievement of the SDGs by 2030. And then, the pandemic arrived in 2020, which means this decade is going to be even more crucial, but more challenging. The 17th of the 17th SDGs is"Partnerships for the Goals." And I think the coming together of non-traditional allies, including corporates, startups, multilateral organizations like the United Nations, NGOs, you know, this is what's going to help to a large extent, to help us make progress. And that's the note I am the book on. And so in addition to corporate innovation becoming more effective, which I certainly hope will be the case, I hope this broader perspective on social impact will also be noted. And that's something I try a point I try to make with my students as well because they're the sort of future of corporate China, and I think that's going to be very crucial.

Rich Robinson:

Terrific. Excellent. Wow. Excellent way to end the book and excellent way to wrap up our chat as well too. So, we've not met in person but as advertised. Indeed. Thank you, Shameen. Thank you, Professor. It's really a pleasure. And I don't have to say good luck with the book. I know it's going to do super well. It's very timely and in addition to the awesome title, it's something that I think the ecosystem will hungrily devour.

Shameen Prasantham:

Oh, you're very kind and it is been a tremendous pleasure. I can't believe that we actually haven't met in person before, because we know so many people in common and I've come across your work for a long time. So this was a real pleasure. If I may include a shameless plug. Anybody interested to learn more? There's a website called www.gorillascandance.com and you'll get more information about the book there.

Rich Robinson:

Fantastic. Wonderful. Thank you sir. All the best. And have a great weekend, and thank you.

Shameen Prasantham:

Thank you so much. Likewise, Rich.

Rich Robinson:

Thank you.