In 1917, a young emigrant from Asturias set up a small hardware shop in the Dominican Republic.

Today, Grupo Corripio counts more than 30 companies in four industries: media, energy and mobility, consumer goods, and hardware and construction. 

With 10,000 employees, it is one of the country’s largest business groups.

Success like that has a side effect. “Inside, there are biases that shaped the organisation and got it where it is. When it succeeds, as is our case, those biases take even deeper root,” says Isis Abreu, Vice President of Transformation and Governance.

Meanwhile, the market has stopped waiting. Major shifts used to come every 25 years, then every 10. Now, Isis says, they come every year, and a group that relies only on in-house teams risks falling behind its own market.

So Grupo Corripio opened its doors to startups with the EU-LAC Digital Accelerator.

In a new episode of the EU-LAC Digital Accelerator podcast, Isis and Gabriel Jiménez, Corporate Productivity and Continuous Improvement Manager, talked to two mentors of the acceleration programme:

• Miguel Rodríguez, from Octantis,
• Mayca de Castro, from IESE Business School.

So, what does a century-old group learn from working with startups?

1. Startups let a century-old group test fast, and fail small

Grupo Corripio is short of time to keep up with market innovations. Gabriel compares two ways to solve this problem.

The usual one is a traditional consultancy project, planned over a year, with commitments made upfront and everything bet on one outcome.

The startup way is different: “Each startup offers us a low-risk environment to test and experiment.”

If the solution works, you scale it. If it does not, you adjust before the budget is gone.

Isis says it in fewer words: “When it’s small, we can make small mistakes. Then you can extrapolate and let it run.”

There is a second gain, harder to measure: startups bring specialised knowledge that, as Isis puts it, is “not contaminated by everything we do the way we have always done it”.

2. Start with the challenge, not the startup

Gabriel’s rule: before you look for a startup, define the challenge, and make sure it answers a real business need.

The best candidates are the problems that come back year after year, or that take two or three years to solve.

Isis adds a filter. Needs are endless, so prioritise the ones that unlock the group’s strategy.

Here is how the process looked for Grupo Corripio:

Challenge workshop: business leaders from 15 group companies met in person in the Dominican Republic. 8 of those companies submitted 15 challenges. Scouting: the acceleration team shortlisted 18 startups from 11 countries in Latin America and Europe. It favoured solutions that work across sectors and solve several challenges at once. Pitching days: 15 startups presented over two days in early 2025. Leaders scored each one in real time on a scoring sheet. One-to-ones: 11 startups moved on to one-to-one meetings with group companies. Proof of concept: The team prioritised 3 collaborations. One went ahead as a proof of concept with Dribia, a Catalan startup.

Two lessons came out of it.

The challenge can change shape, and that is a good sign. The starting topic was manufacturing execution. The workshop broke it down into predictive maintenance and quality control. Yet the challenge that reached proof of concept was one nobody had written down at first: sales forecasting.

A corporate team has to say no. Several group companies wanted to meet startups outside their own challenges. The corporate team held them back: “It’s not the moment. Let’s prioritise the ones you have already identified.”

Drivia won on real case studies and a structured method: work in sprints, with a validation gate at the end of each one.

Before the proof of concept began, it went through three or four one-to-ones: technology permissions, legal, operations, and “if it works, how do we scale it?”

The decision to scale rests on three questions:

1. ROI: how fast does the investment pay back?
2. Scalability within the group: if it works in one company, can it roll out to others?
3. Integration: how does it plug into sales, enterprise management and financial platforms?

More than 30 people took part across the process, including over 15 business leaders.

3. The lasting gain is a method you can reuse

For its second partnership, Grupo Corripio did things differently.

It found the startup on its own. It formed the partnership and applied to the acceleration programme through an open call.

But it kept every stage: challenge, scope, return analysis. The startup had to submit a proposal and a prior analysis with a clear value promise before any pilot.

“We learnt from the previous process that all those filtering layers have to happen,” Gabriel says.

Isis on what stays once the programme ends: “It leaves learnings, it leaves a methodology, it leaves new neurons switched on to keep searching from then on.”

Gabriel’s closing argument is aimed at any corporate: “I cannot imagine a company trying to stay competitive without access to all the innovation possibilities that exist in the market.”

▶️ Watch the full podcast with Isis Abreu and Gabriel Jiménez