We've learned, repeatedly, that the best innovation is always grounded in a problem or a challenge that matters to you, your customers, and your business strategy.

We work like a startup in an iterative fashion, first helping you concisely identify and convey the challenges that are most important to solve. Then, look for inspiration and curate ideas that are going to help you think of new challenges and new problems. During this iteration process, we are always grounded in the problem.

Alchemist's role is to be deeply connected to both the methodology of identifying and asking what innovation problems are and to the startup ecosystem all over the world.

We amplify and scale your scouting ability, but more importantly, we help you go deeper. Scouting is only part of the issue. Convincing a startup to talk and share data that gives you insight is challenging.

And that's where our methodology comes in. 

We love this question because this is one of the classic challenges of corporate innovation!

And the answer to getting buy-in is involvement. Every step between your insights and the internal stakeholders means a loss of credibility for those insights. 

We build a mechanism where your stakeholders can show up at key moments so you can get buy-in and conviction on the innovation challenges you're solving. This opens the floor for dialogue between your stakeholders and the builders and leaders of the future from the startup world so that they feel a personal stake in your work and personal buy-in.

Staying competitive and meeting your customer and internal stakeholder expectations as a business means being current and credible on what the state of the art is.

The most important work that we will do together is ensure that you are highly confident that you understand what innovation is out there, what the state of the art is, and what that means for your business. 

Think IDC

• Insight: Refers to understanding and being informed about the state of the art in innovation.
• Dialogue: Emphasizes the importance of conversations and exchanges within the ecosystem to derive value.
• Credibility: Highlights the trust and legitimacy gained from participating and being recognized in the ecosystem.

H4 is designed to directly address the three biggest challenges in corporate innovation and corporate engagement with startups: 

1.    Knowing where to focus and what the problems are. You can measure ROI through the clarity of the innovation challenges that you have identified

2.    Through access to startups, you will be able to measure ROI by getting insight directly from founders, influencers, and senior leaders that you would not have otherwise had access to.

3.    Lastly, translating the innovation work into direct business value. This is where, fundamentally, we encourage you to measure your ROI qualitatively by stakeholder support and conviction and quantitatively by identifying how many of the challenges you have identified. Have you found a direct solution, and what impact does that have on the business?