Cristian Ull Molina, co-founder of Area101 & Founding Partner at Unitatea Capital

In this interview, we speak with Cristian Ull Molina, co-founder of Area101—a community that brings together more than 200 leaders in corporate innovation—co-author of the book 101 Stories of Innovation and Founding Partner at Unitatea Capital, about how value-driven relationships are built between the entrepreneurial world and large companies.

Throughout the conversation, he shares the lessons learned after years working in open innovation, corporate innovation, venture building, early-stage investment, and global acceleration programs, combining the best of three worlds: corporations, startups and international ecosystems.

He also reflects on the most common mistakes that cause initial collaborations with corporations to fail, the criteria and dynamics that guide corporate innovation, as well as the importance of empathy, focus, and business language.

As Ull Molina points out, "innovation has the complexity of transforming what the company does today while, at the same time, building what it will do tomorrow," an idea that sums up his way of understanding an ecosystem that is increasingly interconnected and at the service of the people who make it possible.

Your career has focused on corporate innovation. What specific experience led you to specialize in this field, and what can startups that want to collaborate with large companies learn from it?

For me, corporate innovation is the term that defines my professional career today. Innovation is something we have talked about all our lives in different forms: in the end, it is the tool or vehicle through which, above all, an established company remains competitive over time.

Many years ago, innovation was about how to make production more efficient and reduce costs; later, how to innovate in quality; then, how to differentiate ourselves; and today it is largely based on entrepreneurship as a way of adopting more speed in order to remain relevant.

The specific specialization goes back, for me, to two things. First, the experience I had in Japan analyzing different societies from a cultural perspective and seeing how they showed different predispositions toward innovation and disruption. I spent a year analyzing how a country’s culture gives more or less weight to innovation processes, comparing Japan, Spain, the United States, and Israel. 

Second, my career already began in innovation departments at companies such as the Port of Valencia or Logifruit—which manages part of Mercadona’s logistics—and that brought me closer to seeing innovation from the inside, with the particular challenge of introducing something so aligned with exploration into a company with an enormous focus on exploitation and the current business.

What can a startup learn from this? That many times we are all too self-focused. 

A startup may feel that a corporation’s speed when collaborating is not the right one, and that is true. But there is something I would say to any startup: you have to manage through empathy and be able to navigate the complexity of a large company. 

There is a metaphor I really like. A study said that when we drive alone, we go 40% faster than when we drive with friends or family. This can be applied to the business world: a startup can move much faster, but when it gains scale, and even becomes a scaleup or a corporation, it becomes more focused on mitigating risk than on generating opportunities. 

The lesson is to have empathy and navigate that complexity with skill so as to adapt it to your own benefit, whether that is a pilot, a collaboration, a partnership, or a potential investment.

After interviewing more than 100 leaders, what patterns did you see in organizations that truly innovate?

It was an exercise we carried out at Area101 that ended up becoming a book, 101 Stories of Innovation, based on the stories of more than one hundred companies. What patterns did we find? First, that the challenges are fairly common regardless of sector and geography.

There are common themes. One is culture management: in a large company, how you are able to introduce that antibody or that virus of innovation internally is a challenge to be managed. 

Another is the duality between exploration and exploitation: in large companies there are incentives for short-term thinking, short-term sales, hitting targets… how do we combine that with elements such as open innovation, which may feed us tomorrow or the day after tomorrow?

And above all, the fundamental point: sometimes the brand keeps us from seeing clearly. We see a large company and fail to realize that, in the end, they are people—and people with incentives. Each of the people leading innovation in these companies had their own moments, incentives, and ways of managing it, and many were the best allies of startups. But they are always like a middleman, in between the corporation and the startup, supporting transformation. 

I would keep one phrase: innovation has the complexity of transforming what the company does today while, at the same time, building what the company will do tomorrow. That duality is very difficult to bring into day-to-day practice.

Many startups fail in their first attempt to work with corporations. In your experience, what are the most common mistakes, and how do you detect them before they derail a collaboration?

For me, there are two main parts. The first is that when you are building a company, and especially if it is your first time, the uncertainty you are dealing with is enormous—about your business model, about who your main customer is. 

Suddenly, you may find yourself seduced by a corporation that tells you, "hey, you’re going in this direction, but I’d like this other thing," and you begin to fall into building a business model for every company or customer you have. That takes you off your roadmap. 

That is why the first thing I would recommend is to stay focused: be very clear about what you are doing and for whom, and be able to make difficult decisions, even saying no to a company. 

Maybe your solution is not for everyone, and even if some may want something from you, the energy and time you devote to managing those kinds of projects creates a very significant opportunity cost.

The second is to understand and define from the outset what the potential objectives with the company are. 

Are we talking about a commercial pilot? A co-creation with a partner to develop something together? A company that could become a potential buyer in the future? Each case is managed differently. As an entrepreneur, you need to train yourself even in these collaboration mechanisms with corporations, because they give us many of the keys to later accelerate those kinds of relationships.

And I would add another perspective. A frequent mistake is not speaking the same language as the corporation: having your own "script" and repeating it without understanding what KPI moves the value needle in each company. 

You need to speak the language of business, not technology, and be highly consultative in your conversations with corporations.

You have been a mentor on global platforms such as 500 Global, Relab, and EIT Food. What behaviors set apart the teams that scale from those that fall by the wayside?

There is a very interesting point here, and it is the key word: scale. Many times in entrepreneurship people say, "launch a solution, find product-market fit, and then scale," and it seems the difficult part is the first one. But in reality, getting from zero to one is just as difficult as getting from one to ten.

For me, the key lies in how that density of talent is generated. How a startup is able to scale the role beyond the founding team, into that second layer of new leaders who grow and take on part of what is being done. 

Here I am very inspired by a concept we talk about at Area101, heavily inspired by my co-founder Dani, which we call "the freedom letter". As an entrepreneur, what am I doing today, and what things do I not want to still be doing three months from now because I can delegate them, automate them, and therefore scale?

As entrepreneurs, we can get stuck in the dilemma of being jugglers who are involved in everything and therefore in nothing. 

If we are able to identify what things the team can gradually take on—and even more so today, with AI making it possible to automate many internal processes—that is part of the key to reaching scale, always assuming that you already have something that has achieved a certain level of validation.

Building Area101 is no trivial task. What lessons did it leave you with, and what can startups apply to create valuable relationships?

At Area101, we are a corporate innovation platform. Today we work with more than 250 corporations, with their innovation and talent teams, and everything has been based on several principles.

The first is focus on what we are. We are a community, and a community is defined by a set of relationships among organizations made up of people. The constant question is how we generate value continuously for these companies—here we are mainly talking about Open Innovation teams—while staying very clear about that essence.

The second principle is to be very agile. We realized that every three months we were like a new company. It happens in any startup journey: you look back and realize that every three months you seem, at every level, like a different organization. That gives you opportunities, and from there new business models have emerged, such as Lab 101 Solutions, a digital product development unit for innovation. The lesson is that the journey will give you countless opportunities: keep the essence, but be able to adapt, evolve, and make the most of them when they appear.

And the third, very closely linked to the second: never lose focus. The world of entrepreneurship tells you that you can do everything, but the day has 24 hours, the team has only so many people, and the world is unmanageable. The ability to prioritize, to build roadmaps, and to professionalize parts of different areas as you grow is another very important insight. It is not easy, but if you have a clear purpose, know what you are good at and what you want to do, identify opportunities that help you grow, and are able to prioritize them, then you have a small playbook of principles to activate.

You have supported startups entering complex sectors such as food, health, mobility, or education. What should they be clear about before entering industries that are so regulated or technical?

From our investor perspective, we have seen startups trying to enter sectors such as health or mobility, which are highly regulated. Wearing that investor hat, I have personally always had one principle: to back someone who knows the industry very well and has been able to identify an opportunity within it. Then the road will tell whether the initial idea is the right one or whether it will change along the way.

If someone wants to build a startup in these industries, they need to be almost an expert in them. They need to be able, in conversation with anyone, to clearly lay out what the opportunities are, what the threats are, and, if there is existing regulation, to know how to manage it and understand how it is going to evolve over time. 

There is always a degree of uncertainty, of course. For me, nothing is more important than speaking with someone who, whatever the sector, has the ability to go into that level of detail and who has even experienced firsthand the opportunity they want to disrupt. That is the best banner under which to lead a startup.

The first thing I ask someone who is starting a company is: why you and not someone else? And the best answer is: because the problem and need I am trying to solve is something I have lived through, been part of, or somehow suffered, and that is why I can now come with a solution. 

Whatever the sector and level of regulation, regulation is simply one more obstacle on the path we travel as entrepreneurs. 

And it is not just knowledge; you also have to take the ecosystem into account. Someone who has been inside an industry knows the set of actors who, in one way or another, can support them in developing their idea, and that helps them move faster and with greater confidence amid uncertainty.

Many founders want to understand how innovation executives think. What practical advice would you give to make decisions that are more aligned with this profile and increase the chances of real collaboration?

We have to understand that innovation profiles in corporations respond to the concept of a door opener. They are people who often have a cross-functional view of the company, but who are not always the decision makers one hundred percent. They are enablers whom the company places across the organization to provide a service and see how the current business can be innovated through technology, as well as to drive new businesses or solutions. 

That is why they are the best translators between the company’s language and that of the ecosystem and entrepreneurship. Understanding this, you need to try to make things very easy for them, for example by presenting a business case, understanding which company you are addressing, and seeing what its opportunity areas are. 

For example, energy companies are focused on decarbonization—how does your solution directly address decarbonization? Insurers are focused on mobility—how do your mobility solutions impact their challenges? The healthcare sector is focused on patient experience—how do you improve that vertical? 

A startup has to build, from its value proposition, what the very concrete use cases are that can have an impact on different types of companies. And when you speak with an innovation team, you need to come with your homework done: prepare almost a proposal, a very grounded model of how a corporation can collaborate with you.

For me, what has worked best over time to accelerate collaborations with startups is absolute pragmatism. Innovation is the door, but many times it is the corporation that provides the means, the resources, and the time. 

Build simple business cases, be prescriptive in how to approach the collaboration, and make things as simple as possible. Think about the fact that corporations mature in innovation see between 400 and 500 startups and solutions every year, in limited time and with scarce resources. The question is: how can we stand out in that sea of possibilities?

To close, based on your experience, how can the ONE Platform help startups seeking to connect with corporations, funds, innovation programs, and real collaboration opportunities?

I believe that the work you are doing at ONE is very necessary: bringing together and generating ecosystem density in one single space so that connections can flow and value can be transmitted within an ecosystem like the national one.

Wearing my entrepreneur hat, I would say that ONE should be one of those spaces we always keep open. Just as each of us has our Slack, our inbox, or our meeting tool, ONE should be a one hundred percent accessible and top-of-mind channel for any entrepreneur who wants access to the broader ecosystem. It is not only about centralizing, but about aggregating and making everything that is happening easier to access.

The value it provides is that of being an aggregating channel for what is happening in the ecosystem: in terms of opportunities, funds, information, and initiatives. Today, that old image of the entrepreneur hidden away in a cave developing a product without going outside has long been an outdated and mistaken view. 

There is a very ecosystem-oriented perspective: what we do is hyperconnected with the rest of the actors, and platforms like ONE are the ones that facilitate that approach.