US-based government management consultancy firm Booz Allen Hamilton has formed a strategic partnership with Washington DC-based incubator 1776 that will see them share resources and experience to help build startups that can provide services to government and enterprise organisations.
Initial areas of focus for the collaboration will include processes or tools that increase an organisation’s innovation or entrepreneurial ability, techniques and best practices for crowdsourcing or challenge-based innovation, and special showcase events such as the ‘hackcelerators’ that Booz Allen and 1776 began putting on earlier this month.
“As consultants we’re typically side-by-side with our clients trying to solve their hardest problems with them,” Booz Allen vice president Julie McPherson told the Washington Post. “We realise the economy today and the complexity of the problems our clients are facing is quite frankly increasingly exponentially more difficult.
“This is an opportunity to get greater insights and access into what’s happening in the commercial space, and what’s happening in the entrepreneurial committee . . . and say: ‘How does this affect and impact our clients and the kinds of problems we’re solving?’”
McPherson added that Booz Allen will be moving some of its staff to 1776’s office in order to mentor startups and source ideas for other clients, particularly those based around new technology or entrepreneurial approaches to cybersecurity.
“Sure, selfishly we may see something cool and say we want to invest. We can do that,” Karen Dahut, Booz Allen executive vice president, told Washington Business Journal. “But more importantly, we create the channel to bring that idea to the Department of Energy, [or] Transportation. That only helps us at the end of the day.”