“Meeting and funding startup founders pulls a large corporation into the street-level reality of the trends that drive changing consumer preferences.”

^^ I love that. My co-worker Sam Mallikarjunan is doing some really interesting research on using patents to track where startups are heading. For example, if Blockbuster had been tracking Netflix patents, they could figured out pretty quickly that Netflix had much bigger plans than mail-order DVD rentals. Startups are constantly looking for new, better, cheaper ways to do something, big companies have to stay in touch with that. It’s too easy to think, “we’ve solved that problem” and ignore the new/better ways to solve it.