BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 22
By Fidan Babayeva – Trend:
Every Azerbaijani company should create its own incubation and acceleration center to improve the ecosystem of startups in the country, the co-founder and CEO of Bon.az (Azerbaijani online cashback platform) Orkhan Ahmad told Trend on June 22.
According to Ahmad, a startup can offer interesting and innovative solutions, focusing on services and products that are usually not available for technical reasons.
“By joining a program organized by a bank, a startup can offer new solutions to the banking sector, and the bank, in turn, can provide them to customers,” Akhmad said. “Here the main question is whether the bank will be able to develop a new product on its own or whether the startup will do it. The new solution will be presented to the customer as a new product of the bank. As a result, both the bank and the startup will benefit.”
As he noted, when a corporate or state body creates an incubation and acceleration program within the structure, it may encounter some problems in the common global market.
“To work with such startups, experienced specialists who can use the startup’s ecosystem, are needed, while in the banking sector, employees are focused on internal corporate interests, and in many cases they can actually limit their startup ideas, trying to give the necessary direction,” the CEO said.
“For example, Russia Sberbank’s acceleration program was drawn up with the participation of 500 US startups. The entire acceleration phase was undertaken by these startups, and the bank chose those that offer the necessary products and started using them in their banking services. Applying the same practice, neighboring Georgia also launched its acceleration program with 500 startups at Bank of Georgia," Ahmad pointed out.
“If a bank or other enterprise creates an incubation and acceleration center inside the institution and wants to achieve a high-quality result, then it should involve people who are experts in the startup business and the organization involved in this business in order to achieve the positive result both for the bank and for the startup, otherwise it will lead to a loss of time and significant expenses,” he noted. “We need people or companies that play the role of a bridge between a startup and a corporate institution, have knowledge and experience in the ecosystem of startups.”
“A common feature of the aforementioned approaches was that the opening of incubation and acceleration centers by banks is a positive moment for the ecosystem, but this should be done at a high quality level in order to see the positive result,” he added.
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