How We Work: The Discovery Phase

In our previous post, we talked about investible corporate ventures and how organisations can build them successfully. In this series of posts, we write about our approach to corporate venture building.

Our venture building process has three different and distinct phases:

1. Discovery Phase
2. Design Phase
3. Build Phase

The Discovery Phase is all about understanding your options for potential innovation strategies (including venture building) and identifying what potential ventures your company should explore. Our Wright Partners work with your senior team and other relevant stakeholders across 4 different areas in an intensive 8 weeks:

1. Choice of innovation approach (e.g., innovation at the core, investment, partnership or venture building)
2. Unfair advantages to leverage in pursuit of innovation ensuring strategy success is much more likely
3. Narrowing the value spaces
4. Identifying the problems that the approach can solve in the market and their value
5. Identifying the key governance elements to manage the approach?

It is perhaps our least favourite phase as it is very much like consulting and low on execution, but it is critical in setting the tone for the future of the venture. Additionally, in line with our mindset of optionality for the corporate, and by coming on as partners from day one, we are ok if the innovation approach that suits you best is not aligned with our expertise (Venture Building). At times, we have found that the organisation is not ready to further develop ventures. The tree below shows three different innovation approaches (A, B, C) that could suit you best based on our deep dive together during the Discovery Phase.

For example, for the Discovery Phase we did with a leading telco, we interviewed key stakeholders, reviewed the telco’s market positioning, conducted asset mapping, mapped the value chain (revenue & profit pools), and analysed and prioritised pain points. From this, we identified 4 ventures each in three verticals to explore with the telco. These were in EdTech, Fintech, and Retail Analytics. The telco had assets that supported these ventures such as the right distribution network, existing business units, licences, and existing products to tie-in with the venture.

Stay tuned for our next post where we explain how the Design Phase of a venture is structured and what the outcomes are. If you would like to discuss building a corporate venture with us, drop us a note. We would love to understand how we can help you build your corporate venture!