How can you incubate and commercialize new business ideas with corporate venturing?

Strategic alliances are required to solve customer problems quickly, build the best solution and reduce the time to market. Corporate venture capital investment gives corporate opportunities to either build products together or help them succeed and in the process make money from the investment. It is a win win for both entities. This also helps corporation to get access to talent which is generally difficult to acquire in a competitive market. Overall for the ecosystem this helps and drives innovation across the board. Challenges still remain with internal struggles to embibe external solutions.

?? Foster an internal culture of intrapreneurship In corporate venturing, empowering your team to act as intrapreneurs is key. Here’s how: ?? Encourage innovation: provide resources and freedom for employees to experiment and innovate. ?? Support risk-taking: create a safe space for taking calculated risks, fostering creative problem-solving. ?? Nurture ideas: support and develop employee-generated ideas, turning them into viable business solutions. ?? Drive engagement: enhancing employee involvement boosts retention and nurtures a dynamic work environment. Embrace intrapreneurship for sustainable growth and innovation within your corporation!

Lean Venture Building is and entrepreneurial way for established companies to help their innovators start their own company. ??In essence, it is a community driven approach to help new companies early on, with an option to benefit of their success in terms of one's own core business. ??Think of it as helping start-up new partners, suppliers or customers in a both low-cost and low-risk manner. ??For that, you need a small team of curators and matchmakers who are in touch with the founders on a regular basis in a long-term, strategic and patient manner. ?? Most importantly: don't judge early on as every business idea is a bad idea to start with.

Think about incubating new business ideas like tending to a greenhouse. Each idea is nurtured in this protective environment, allowing it to grow. Once you have a robust MVP, you can incorporate in the broader organization, however, now you ensure the new business model is ready to flourish in a more competitive environment.

Rapid prototyping & feedback loops ?? Transform your corporate venturing with these key steps: ?? Quick prototyping: turn ideas into tangible prototypes swiftly, allowing for immediate testing and iteration. ?? Gather feedback: continuously collect and integrate user and market feedback to refine your product. ?? Iterate for perfection: use insights gained to make rapid adjustments, enhancing product-market fit. ?? Drive innovation: speed up the innovation process and boost your chances of commercial success. Embrace rapid prototyping and feedback loops to accelerate your venture from idea to market!

Start by identifying and prioritizing broad opportunity areas for innovation, through both a top-down and a bottom-up view: ?? Top down: what's our north star? what are our strategic business priorities, our internal capabilities, and our right to play? ?? Bottom up: what do customers need? what is the market telling us? how are new technologies changing the game? The intersection of those two gives you a sweet spot (not too big, not too small) for where to begin exploring new ideas.

Some of the biggest challenges I see are 1. Deciding what NOT to do and being intentional about where and where not to play, to avoid dispersing resources and efforts. 2. Using the right metrics at the right time. Success of an early stage venture cannot be measured in the same way as a commercially mature product. 3. Making go/no-go decisions based on clear (customer-centric) data and indicators, rather than purely on gut feelings and opinions. 4. Being intentional from the start about what the relationship between a new venture and the core business may look like, and involving the right people at the right time to ensure seamless handovers.

Set up the conditions to cultivate small, rapid experiments around new ideas. This can look like a dedicated innovation team or lab, an incubator/accelerator program, partnerships with academia or start-ups that possess key expertise and technology, engaging employees to work on new ideas, etc. The main thing is to start small, move fast, and keep a diversified portfolio of bets. Corporate venturing by nature is about taking calculated risks, you don't want to go all in too quickly on one thing that becomes too big to fail. Experiments are designed to test the riskiest assumptions behind ideas by learning what works and what doesn't, making them more robust, fit for the market, and more likely to scale.