Forming and Launching a New Initiative in the Security & Safety Industry

Opportunity

In 2017, Bosch Building Technologies approached Inventures, a Smithbucklin-owned company, with a novel concept: create a service model for physical security and safety devices. This concept would encompass a vast array of devices, including surveillance cameras, access control devices, fire alarms, and smoke detectors. Bosch indicated it had identified other companies interested in collaborating to realize this concept, but it needed assistance to determine the best way to organize the collaboration.

Community Needs

The new security and safety devices service model would require the collaboration of many companies – some of whom are competitors – to develop the necessary specifications, create a collaborative approach to solving common challenges, and ultimately establish a thriving ecosystem with the size and credibility needed to ensure success for the industry. A new ecosystem for this service model should result in a larger or new market for many of the ecosystem players.

Approach

To determine the best way to deliver this novel concept to the industry, strategic analysis was required. Inventures collaborated with Bosch on the first phase of the Inventures Alliance Formation process – Assess & Align. In this phase, Inventures guided Bosch through all of the possible collaboration entity options: Would a limited liability corporation, a joint venture, or a technology alliance be the right entity type for global collaboration? Once Bosch determined a technology alliance was the best approach, work began to define the foundation for the alliance including an initial mission, vision, and value proposition for prospective alliance members. Based on the results of the first phase, Bosch decided to proceed with the formation process and move on to the second phase, Structure.

During the Structure Phase, Inventures and Bosch worked with four additional founding stakeholders: Hanwha Techwin, Milestone Systems, Pelco, and VIVOTEK, to create the legal and structural framework for the proposed alliance. Additionally, a funding platform was developed and the mission, vision, and value propositions were refined and membership tiers were assigned benefits. Once the organizational structure was set, the stakeholders agreed to progress to the final phase, Launch Preparation.

During this phase of the formation process Inventures and the founding stakeholders:

• Developed a 12-month operational plan
• Incorporated the new organization
• Activated a bank account and financial management system
• Instantiated the Board of Directors and held the first Board meeting
• Created a website
• Publicly launched and announced the new technology alliance
• Recruited additional members

Results

The culmination of this work is the Open Security & Safety Alliance (OSSA). OSSA launched with the five founding stakeholders and early adopter members Ambarella Inc., Anixter Inc., AndroVideo, Kings Security Systems Ltd., and NetApp. These companies began sharing their knowledge and expertise within this global alliance to build standards, specifications, best practices, references, and implementation guidelines that will be required to meet the vision and mission of OSSA.

Since the launch of the OSSA in 2018, Inventures provides a variety of services designed to help the alliance meet its mission and grow its ecosystem. OSSA relies on our membership management, financial services,  marketing services, member meeting services, tradeshows and events, executive leadership, global headquarters services, workgroup collaboration and web/IT services. These services enable OSSA to stay focused on its mission to create a framework to provide standards and specifications for common components for data security and privacy, and a drive for improved levels of performance for security and safety solutions.

Inventures is a Smithbucklin-owned company. Learn more about Inventures.