Last year, Sherry Couto released her influential Scale Up Report, which documented the challenges startups have in growing at any kind of pace.

The report revealed that whilst the UK saw more businesses created per capita than the US, there was a struggle in scaling these up into meatier endeavors.

It therefore advocates greater attention from governments being given towards helping start-ups to grow, with 12 policy suggestions given to how this could be achieved.

Gaining visibility

As you can perhaps imagine, many of these recommendations revolve around structural issues such as giving startups access to the talent they need or fostering closer links with the university network.

What the report doesn’t cover so much is how to actually increase the visibility of the startup, which given the hand-to-mouth existence of many startups is a very real challenge, especially when competing with bigger firms.

A common approach to overcome this is to have greater collaboration between those big and small firms, with the big companies posing challenges for the smaller startups to solve.

Connecting small with big

One platform that’s trying to facilitate that is called Iterate.  Big companies can post up challenges to the platform, with startups then working with the big company to help solve the problem.

The Iterate team have already worked with around 40 retail companies and hope to expand this considerably with their new platform.

A recent Accenture study revealed that accelerators are commonly deployed by companies looking to work more effectively with startups, but Iterate want to provide an alternative.

The platform has already connected up startups with over 30 corporations, with a number of these evolving into fully fledged partnerships.

It’s an interesting approach.  As with other startups, the challenge will be showing to companies that taking an open approach like this is better than keeping the challenges relatively in-house.  It will be one to keep an eye on to see how successful they are.

Check out the video below for more information about Iterate.