Embracing change is better than resisting it, Didem Un Ates, global partnerships director at Microsoft Accelerators, says.

In what ways are start-ups disrupting traditional set-ups?

Disruption can happen in every business dimension one can think of, from product, service, time to market and time to serve customers to distribution, payment models, and channel to market.

We are seeing disruption in all sectors and in all elements of the value chain across the world. Some researchers have grouped these disruption models into eight areas, namely digital stores, content hubs, sharing hubs, promoters, aggregators, discriminators, crowd sourcers and matchers. However, I would imagine there are and will be more models than these.

For traditional businesses, is it a matter of beating start-ups or joining them?

Our view is that embracing change is always going to be better than resisting it. Start-ups offer traditional businesses vast opportunities for innovation, sensors to market, better, faster cycles to market, cost efficiency and culture change to enable sustainable growth and success. And, of course, traditional businesses offer start-ups significant opportunities for access to markets and customers as well. So it is a win-win for all if challenges are managed well and parties focus on opportunities to grow the pie.

What different role do start-ups play in the US, EMEA regions and Asia?

There are different types of start-ups and various factors impacting a specific ecosystem. For instance, according to entrepreneur Steve Blank, there are six types of start-ups: lifestyle, small business, social, scalable, buyable and large. The types of start-ups prevalent in each region as well as different needs of each entrepreneurial ecosystem determine the role start-ups play in that region.

In the US, start-ups play a major economic and disruptive role because the focus is on scalable, buyable, or large start-ups, especially in Silicon Valley. They also play a huge role in being a role model to the rest of the world in terms of investment models, growth management and engineering talent development.

In EMEA – which I would split into two as Europe and MENA – the story is different. In Europe, start-ups challenge and initiate governments to move faster for social impact, green technologies and smart cities. They are the locomotives of social change and economic development. There is almost always an underlying expectation that entrepreneurs should give back and businesses are there to serve society, not the other way around.

In MENA, most start-ups are smaller scale. They are more about lifestyle or small business models, or ‘copycats’ of ideas done elsewhere. As such, even though we do not see too many unicorns there, start-ups play a huge role in bringing social hope, cultural change, and economic progress to the region. For instance, we are seeing female entrepreneurs in the Middle East starting online businesses which they manage from home. These people would have normally shied from going to the office where they would need to work with men. As such, in addition to economic development, start-ups and digital disruption enhance gender equality and e-learning in these emerging markets.

Asia, on the other hand, is completely different. My observation is that start-ups there pave the way for deeper cultural change. Entrepreneurs there demonstrate that it is fine to be more individualistic, to take more risk and to fail. We even get requests from governments to help support start-ups and ecosystems in these areas.

Within a start-up context, failure is embraced as part of the journey. But for how long would an economy suffer failure?

This is a very relative question. Just like each individual entrepreneur has (or should have) a target date to pull the plug on his business if success or breakeven does not seem to arrive, economies and governments should have their plans, budgets, and timelines to incentivise their entrepreneurial ecosystems. While we all know start-ups are the future for economic growth and sustainability, how long each ecosystem will need in order to get there will be determined on a case-by-case basis.

How does Microsoft support start-ups?

We support start-ups worldwide, along their whole start-up life cycle. Over 100,000 start-ups and 1,500 partners from more than 100 countries have benefited from Microsoft’s programmes and packages such as BizSpark since 2008.

At our seven Microsoft Accelerators around the world – London, Paris, Berlin, Tel Aviv, Seattle, Beijing and Bangalore – we offer a very demanding and successful acceleration programme to high growth start-ups. The results have been phenomenal to date.

We also offer many other benefits and programmes such as start-up bootcamps for early stage start-ups, innovation and matching days for our corporate partners and customers, alumni and mentoring programmes, and success management resources to scale high potential start-ups. Finally, we have recently launched a fund called Microsoft Ventures which invests in start-ups as well.

What are the benefits that such partnerships present to Microsoft?

We value the innovation and disruptive thinking start-ups bring to our sector immensely. They also enable us to monitor trends and technologies on a global scale.

In turn, all these efforts bring business to us. They enable us to serve our current customers and partners better as well as to acquire new customers and users for our platform and services. Simply put, we grow as start-ups grow.

You will be participating in the Zest event. What does Microsoft plan to achieve through your participation?

I am part of a business unit called the Evangelism team which means we aim to share our services, know-how, and support with the wider developer and start-up ecosystems. Microsoft Accelerators, in particular, have been so successful in their four years of existence that start-ups around the world as well as our partners such as corporates, governments, or universities request us to scale our efforts rapidly so that they can benefit from our learning, know-how, and technology support. Our aim is to serve them in the most efficient and impactful manner.

Meeting start-ups as well as potential partners at Zest would enable us to achieve these goals and give us an opportunity to enhance our scale out strategy and plans, if necessary.

This article first appeared in the Zest supplement carried in The Sunday Times of Malta.