The BridgeCommunity is a unique entrepreneurial community model, backed by an exclusive set of large corporates, focused on growing communities through corporate-startup collaboration.

THE PROGRAM

In the summer of 2014 Coca-Cola launched a commercialization program for early stage software technology startups in Tel Aviv, called The Bridge - providing a “Bridge” between Israeli startups and the North American market. The commercialization methodology powering the program was a collaborative endeavor. The local startup ecosystem and the startups selected for the first cohort collectively helped to design a model that uniquely formed effective corporate relationships between the startups and Coca-Cola, focused on solving a core business need.

Coca-Cola expanded the footprint of the program by launching in their home town of Atlanta in 2016. Atlanta’s market offered a new set of challenges for the model. Activating in an emerging startup ecosystem necessitated the methodology to be adjusted from leveraging an existing market to amplifying a nascent ecosystem. The new methodology added to the Tel Aviv model by embracing both the local corporates headquartered in Atlanta and the local community itself. The program’s targeted outreach initiative develops future local entrepreneurial talent, which builds a growing pool of local startups that the program can draw from. This new sustainable innovation methodology became the foundation for BridgeCommunity program, focused once more on solving core business needs of its corporate members, including Coca-Cola, while also helping to develop future entrepreneurial talent and growing the local startup ecosystem.