Goals: following directions: solutions for offline stores (including contactless customer service, new solutions for surface disinfection, etc.); solutions for online trading and delivery (including remote support for online sales); transport and logistic; increasing the efficiency of internal processes; advertising and marketing technologies; home mobile entertainment; financial solutions; improving customer experience: from planning a purchase to collecting feedback after visiting a store; increasing the efficiency of internal processes (hiring and training personnel, working with documents, finances); telemedicine; HoReCa automation solutions; as well as solutions using special technologies (automatic interior design, SKU cycle analysis, assortment planning automation, situational center, ML and AI in analytics, AR / VR computing, multi-access edge computing – MEC, data management and analytical storage, and others).
Scouting focused on technological solutions using 5G, Machine Learning, IoT / M2M, Computer Vision, Big Data, AI, Robotics, AR / VR / MR, Cloud Tech, Blockchain, as well as new materials, environmentally friendly packaging, equipment for moving goods and quick collection of orders. The solutions should be potentially interesting for implementation by the Retail Innovation Tech Alliance partners: X5 Retail Group, Beeline, M.Video-Eldorado and Hoff.
After the formation of the funnel, we also carried out a preliminary analysis of applications according to a number of criteria (the relevance of the applications received from companies to the RITA criteria, including the compliance of the application case and the needs of each RITA partner, the presence of previously conducted pilots, the experience of the founders), the formation of a rating of companies and the distribution of received applications among the 4 partners of the alliance by relevance.
Before the start of scouting technology companies, the GoTech Innovation team studied the markets of the target countries and proposed individual search algorithms for each region, developed a questionnaire for accepting applications in the TechScout platform that was built in the Retail Innovation Tech Alliance website as a widget. In total, GoTech Innovation analysts have made more than 5,000 contacts with technology companies. In support of scouting, an information campaign was organized to find relevant startups.
The finalist companies selected by the experts of the RITA alliance (15 companies in each selection, a total of 2 selections in 2020) received invitations to the deal flow session. Deal flow session is an online pitch session of companies for the presentation of technological solutions developed by them to partners of the RITA alliance in Russian or English.
As part of the preparation of scouting, work was also carried out: design and development of the RITA website, preparation of materials for an information campaign (implemented in two languages - Russian and English), including interviews with representatives of the RITA alliance.
In 2020, we organized two technology company scouting programs for alliance partners. As a result of the first program (April 14 – May 14, 2020) 395 applications were received from innovation teams from 17 countries. The second program (October 14 – December 02, 2020) gathered 182 technological solutions from teams from 19 countries.
In total, following the results of two scouting programs, 577 applications from companies from 26 countries were accepted. The number of applications received exceeded the plan by 4 times. As a result of the Deal flow sessions, more than 45 individual meetings have already been held, partner companies are at the stages of preparing and launching pilots with selected teams.
GoTech team has been working with startups for more than 10 years. If you want to run a corporate accelerator, prepare to hold a contest, conference, hackathon, pitch-session or any other event, where it comes to startups and technologies – let’s get acquainted, we will be glad to help.
GoTech is a leader in the field of technology scouting. Our funnel numbers more than 12 000 startups from 50 countries and is constantly updated. Experienced team and international partner network allow finding solutions for corporate tasks and startups for investment in Russia, CIS, Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
We use our own TechScout platform to work with startups. Now it is available for wide use. With the help of TechScout, you will be able to collect applications from startups on your website, manage the pipeline, organize the work of experts and monitor the results of the assessment.
What’s on your mind? We would love to help you with all topics related to innovation and getting things done. Let’s talk.