Dr. Shameen Prashantham
Most large companies have an innovation problem they cannot solve internally. They have signed memoranda with startups, run accelerators, opened innovation labs, and still struggle to convert any of it into operating advantage. The gap is not strategic intent. It is the practical discipline of partnering across a size and culture asymmetry that defeats most corporate teams.
Shameen Prashantham is a CEIBS professor who shows large corporations how to turn startup partnerships from PR set pieces into a repeatable source of innovation and growth.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Shameen Prashantham
- Owns a defined intellectual territory, corporate-and-startup partnering, that almost no other senior strategy academic has built a 15-year body of fieldwork around.
- Wrote the practitioner book on the subject. Gorillas Can Dance (Wiley, 2021) sets out a tested framework of synergy, interface and exemplar drawn from work with Microsoft, SAP, Bayer, Bosch, BMW, Cisco, Ford, IBM, Intel, Unilever, Walmart and others.
- Brings genuinely first-hand China and emerging-market perspective to Western boards. Based at CEIBS in Shanghai, with active fieldwork across Bangalore, Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, Tel Aviv and Silicon Valley, he can discuss what Chinese firms actually do, not what Western analysts assume.
- Writes for the audience he speaks to. Recent contributions to Harvard Business Review, including a June 2024 piece on safe engagement with China, give a buyer confidence the keynote will land at board level rather than in academic register.
- As CEIBS Associate Dean (Africa) and former MBA Director, he is one of a small group of strategy academics with substantive operating insight into both China and Africa, the two markets large corporations most often handle badly.
Biography highlights
- Professor of International Business and Strategy, China Europe International Business School (CEIBS), Shanghai.
- Associate Dean (Africa), CEIBS. Previously Associate Dean and MBA Director, 2020 to 2024.
- Author of Gorillas Can Dance: Lessons from Microsoft and Other Corporations on Partnering with Startups (Wiley, 2021).
- Author of Born Globals, Networks, and the Large Multinational Enterprise (Routledge).
- Research published in Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Business Venturing, Journal of Management Studies, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, and Organization Studies.
- Contributor to Harvard Business Review, Financial Times and the Brightline-Thinkers50 volume Strategy@Work.
Biography
Microsoft, SAP, Bayer, BMW, Walmart and Unilever have all built programmes to partner with startups. Few of those programmes work as designed. The reason is rarely strategy. It is the operating asymmetry between a $200 billion balance sheet and a 30-person company, and almost no one has studied that asymmetry as carefully or for as long as the author of Gorillas Can Dance.
Based at CEIBS in Shanghai, Shameen Prashantham has spent more than fifteen years inside this question. His fieldwork runs across Silicon Valley, Bangalore, Tel Aviv, Beijing, Berlin, Lagos, Nairobi and Accra. The book sets out three pillars, synergy, interface and exemplar, that distinguish corporate partnership programmes that produce real innovation from those that produce press releases.
His academic credibility is straightforward. PhD from the University of Strathclyde. Research in the Journal of International Business Studies, the Journal of Business Venturing, the Journal of Management Studies, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, and Organization Studies. The work translates into Harvard Business Review, where his June 2024 piece on safe engagement with China ran in the print edition.
What buyers tend to value most is the geography. He sits in Shanghai, runs CEIBS engagement in Africa, and has serious working knowledge of Indian and Israeli innovation ecosystems. For a Western board trying to decide whether and how to partner in or from emerging markets, that combination is rare and expensive to replicate.
Key speaking topics
- Corporate-startup partnerships
- Innovation strategy in large corporations
- Doing business in and with China
- Emerging-market growth strategy
- Africa as a strategic market
- Corporate entrepreneurship
- Sustainable Development Goals partnerships
Ideal for
- CEOs, chief strategy officers and chief innovation officers running corporate venturing or startup-engagement programmes.
- Boards reassessing China exposure or considering operating commitments in Africa or India.
- Heads of M&A, partnerships and corporate development designing the next phase of inorganic growth.
- Executive audiences inside multinationals where emerging-market strategy is on the agenda.
Audience outcomes
- A clear test for whether an existing corporate-startup partnership programme is structurally set up to produce results.
- Three operating levers, synergy, interface and exemplar, to apply to live partnership decisions.
- A grounded read on what is actually happening inside Chinese firms and Chinese innovation, beyond Western commentary.
- A working frame for sequencing entry, partnership and growth decisions in emerging markets.
- Concrete examples drawn from named programmes at Microsoft, SAP, Bayer, Unilever, Walmart and others.
Talks
A practitioner-grade walkthrough of how large corporations build the operating capability to partner with startups for innovation and growth.
Key takeaways:
- The three-pillar test, synergy, interface and exemplar, applied to a live corporate programme.
- Why most corporate-startup memoranda underdeliver, and the structural fixes that change the outcome.
- Examples from named partnership programmes including Microsoft, SAP, Bayer, BMW, Cisco, Unilever and Walmart.
How established organisations release entrepreneurial behaviour internally without losing operating discipline.
Key takeaways:
- The conditions under which large companies behave like startups, and the conditions under which they cannot.
- How partnering with external ventures changes internal entrepreneurial capacity.
- What senior leaders practically do to protect entrepreneurial activity inside a large operating model.
A senior-leadership view of growth strategy in China, India and Africa, drawn from CEIBS fieldwork and corporate engagement.
Key takeaways:
- A current read on Chinese corporate strategy and what foreign companies misread about it.
- Where Africa is genuinely a growth market for multinationals and where it is not.
- How emerging-market partnerships connect to the Sustainable Development Goals agenda without becoming corporate theatre.