Greetings, CAF community!  We've spent the last two months researching needs and opportunities through intensive interviews and mini-workshops.  We've found EIGHT projects we'd love to do this year.  Read on for details about:

* TWO confirmed events (The Annual Meeting and the C-Suite Dinner),
* FOUR events in the curation stage, awaiting greenlighting by sponsors
* TWO Practical Working Groups in the curation stage.  

Contact us to share your feedback, tell us which experiences you'd like to attend, and raise your hand as an event sponsor or host!

Confirmed!

Event	Annual Meeting	C-Suite Dinner
Date	Fall 2020, exact date TBD with your help!	April or May 2020, exact date TBD with your help!
Host	Illumina Accelerator	Mostafa Ronaghi, CTO, Illumina
Sponsorship Opportunity	Available!	Available!
Attendance	Curated, free for members as one of 3 events	Members Only, free as one of 3 events
What's happening?	As always, our Annual Meeting brings together corporate innovators who work with startups to dig into the challenges, skills, experiences and opportunities that matter to us all.  Need to know more about the experience? Check out the video, read about our sponsors and attendees, and contact us for a copy of our whitepaper. -- Emerging session themes: *Working Across Divisions:  CAF members are often called upon to provide innovation services and/or startup pipeline to multiple groups within the corporation -- how do you build approaches to serve multiple business units at once?  Let alone simultaneously help the CSR group, the procurement department and the Digital Transformation team!   -- *What’s in the Toolbox?:  You’ve been asking how other groups do acceleration.  Let’s put up our 3rd party tools side by side. 3rd Room or Launchpad for sharing data?  You Noodle or Gust for applications? Why?	Mostafa Ronaghi, CTO and SVP at Illumina, and senior leader holding the Accelerator mandate, aka Accelerator Global Head Amanda Cashin’s boss, will host an intimate meal with five less than 10 senior level leaders of corporate innovation groups.  This two hour, lightly facilitated conversation under the Chatham House rule invites senior leaders to share their insights and questions with each other in a private setting.

Curation Stage:  Events

These five Curation Stage events emerged from CAF companies and are resonating with our community.  They are conceptually ready to go with just one or two more ingredients, such as event sponsorship and key introductions.  Read on to learn more!  

Event	BioTech and Reimbursement	Corporate Innovation Forum in SoCal	Bridging the Gap 2.0:  Materials and Bio, Giants and Startups	Supply Chain and the Circular Economy	Backend/ Backoffice Innovation
Date	Fall or Winter 2020	September, 2020	Fall or Winter 2020	Fall or Winter 2020	Summer, Fall or Winter 2020
Host	Candidate identified!	Alliance for SoCal Innovation	TBD	TBD	TBD
Sponsorship Opportunity	Seeking sponsors	Seeking sponsors	Seeking sponsors	Seeking sponsors	Seeking
Attendance	Curated, free for members as one of 3 events	Curated, free for members as one of 3 events	Curated, free for members as one of 3 events	Curated, free for members as one of 3 events	Curated, free for members as one of 3 events
What's happening?	Our research with CAF companies reveals that reimbursement is among the most significant challenges that startups and corporate innovators face.  The issue of reimbursement is entwined with FDA regulation but is separate, opaque and poorly understood.    We propose to bring together payors, corporate innovators, startups, regulators and regulation/ reimbursement experts to develop a strong shared understanding of how these systems work, what disruptions might be forthcoming, and what tools, processes and communication vehicles we should create as an ecosystem.	Our partner, the Alliance for SoCal Innovation, is hosting a very interesting afternoon looking at the role of corporates in innovation in Southern California.  They’ve opened an opportunity for us to join them that morning in the same space, to develop a curated session for CAF corporates, especially those in LA/SoCal.  We’re currently interviewing CAF companies and others to design the morning. Our favorite topic so far: Corporate Innovators and the SoCal Pipeline Concerned you’re not seeing all the startups you should in SoCal?  This morning we’ll bring together corporate innovators and the 3rd party incubators and universities who know the nooks and crannies of SoCal Innovation.  Guide us: Shall we close the morning with a lunch with early startups? ​	The Advanced Materials world and the world of bio/health are intersecting more and more, in a variety of ways.   Building on the success of our December 2019 event, Bridging the Gap, Materials Giants and Startups, we are eager to delve more deeply into the intersection between materials and bio.  Examples topic we might address:   *Applying tools from one arena to problems in the other -- if we can have self-healing concrete, what else is possible? What bio problems should material companies be thinking about?  What materials problems should bio companies be thinking about?   *What new challenges arise when companies play in new fields?  How might we get up to speed with the regulatory and market realities across these boundaries?	Any company's processes produce byproducts that could be useful to someone else.  We see more and more startups using exhaust gases and scraps to create great products.  How can we leverage the power of ecosystems to accelerate and take deeper advantage through re-use?   At least one member company has significant experience and lessons to share in this space.   We’re currently curating topics, attendees and sponsors.  How you can help: ​Please reach out if this topic intrigues you -- your curiosity and experience can help us design the day.	We're lucky -- as corporate innovators working with startups, we get to see  compelling, eye-catching new ideas with potential strategic impact.   Often, our companies also need us to find  ideas with tactical impact -- document management systems, HR programs, more efficient IT solutions.  It can be hard to find time to pursue these less "sexy" ideas.  What if we came together as a group of corporates, to connect with startups doing important work on the back end of our businesses?

Curation Stage:  Virtual Working Groups

In 2020, we're building online, practical working groups to help our companies move forward.  You've asked us:  We got great insight from a CAF event, what happens next?  How do we move the ball forward?  This is our answer.  

Virtual Working Groups	Metrics, Storytelling and Communication Virtual Working Group	Commercialization, Market Making, Venture Building ​
Date	Fall or Winter 2020	Fall or Winter 2020
Host	Virtual!	Virtual
Sponsorship Opportunity	Seeking sponsors, contact Diana to discuss!	Seeking sponsors, contact Diana to discuss!
Attendance	Curated groups, free for members as one of 3 events	Curated groups, free for members as one of 3 events
What's Happening	Our well-received live workshop, Metrics, Storytelling and Communications to Thaw the Frozen Organization is ready for prime time!  We’re proud of our content, which attendees called “insightful.” The next step for this work is to take it into the practical world.   We’ll put the concepts online, and we’ll curate small non-competitive groups who commit to working on their own internal results communication, together.   CAF provides the content, the matchmaking and the calendar.  You bring your background knowledge and a commitment to your own internal stakeholder.  ​	In the course of our research over the last few months, multiple corporates have pointed at commercialization as a critical factor in their ability to innovate, whether with startups or with internal teams.  One major factor: How we think about risk.   *When is the right time to ask "is there a market for that? *When are we looking at uncertainty, and when are we looking for risk  *How are markets made?  How might we test the possibility of market generation?   *If we have an idea worth commercializing, how do we determine the right structure to house it -- internal?  external spinout?  something else?