The steps of a venture builder to create value are very straight forward and self-explanatory:

Idea Generation à Idea Validation à Team Formation à Business Model Development à Product Development à Launch & Scaling

You can already spot two key nuances compared to the lean startup journey and the typical corporate entrepreneurship campaign:

• There is no direct link between the idea generation flow and the execution team. Team members can be recruited from internal and external resources depending on the requirements of the idea.
• Product follows business model and not the other way around as is typical with lean. If there is no viable business model apparent, no need to build an MVP.

The above steps are simple when a venture builder organization is already established. A venture builder has clear directives, abundant resources and autonomy in order to experiment and test, access to internal and external talent with no bureaucratic hiring bottlenecks and full support of mothership leaders. In exchange for all the privileges they enjoy, the venture builder is heavily measurable and accountable.

What if this organization is not there yet?

We suggest a learning by doing journey. You can’t benchmark existing venture builders and decide what works for your organization without getting your hands dirty. In other words, you need to build ventures while designing and implementing your venture builder.

Step 1: Plant a Seed

Appoint and empower a small team for the build. Ideally, this team knows the organization’s capabilities, knows relevant technologies and trends, has great facilitation skills, has launched a startup or completed an experimental innovation project before and has a keen eye making opportunistic yet strategic bets. Notice the importance of the team, there is not a single person who possess all these skills. You can hire some team members from outside the organization. Actually, if you are looking for a quick turnaround, hiring externally is advised.

Once the team is in place, give them time and resources to explore business opportunities for 3 months. Set clear task-based objectives together to explore the opportunity space and demand outcomes, not productivity.

Step 2: Explore Ideas

Have your team mingle with business owners within the organization. Learn what problems they are facing, how they are servicing internal and external customers, where do they want to improve. Have your team mingle with external stakeholders. Meet some startups in the industry, learn what innovations are still in the oven. Have your team mingle with technology investors. Understand the trends. Hold the team accountable for the number of people and companies they mingled with and the amount of insight they collected.

Step 3: Prepare to be Impressed

Then have you team put together all the insight and boil everything down to 4-6 new business ideas. These can range from new products, new business lines and co-creation with startups. Constructively discuss these ideas with the team to eliminate half of them fast. Record why you eliminated those and continue discussing the winners. Define what you need to be true in order to allocate company time and resources to each idea. Have your team gather the data for idea validation in 2-3 weeks. Come back together with the team and only pick the ideas which are validated. Don’t support almost validated ones or play favourites.

Step 4: Just do It

Decide the budget and time constraints for the selected projects, get team members from within and outside the organization. Give the team freedom to work (at least 70% full time equivalent) and spend (no purchasing or accounting department). Have the seed team mentor and coach the teams and solve problems. The seed team reports to the organization, the project team doesn’t. Their job is to execute within the boundaries set without any additional scrutiny or oversight.

Once the budget and time runs out, decide to launch or not. Don’t extend deadlines or budget, don’t launch unfinished ideas, don’t delay finished ideas. It is the project team and seed team’s responsibility to manage expectations.

Step 5: Assess, Adjust, Structure

Take a look back at what the small seed team and the project teams have achieved. Understand what worked and what didn’t. Adjust your rulebook for exploration, idea validation, team building and execution. If spot an activity which worked exceptionally well, institutionalize it. If your employees come up with the best of the best ideas, launch an idea submission and validation portal. If you achieved great results with startups, launch an open innovation portal or partner with a startup accelerator. If you yielded great investment opportunities, launch a corporate venture capital fund or invest in a VC fluent in your domain.

Step 6: Start Again

Going forward, your implementation cycles will become more frequent and eventually become on-going. Going forward, your seed team will not have to go someplace to mingle, ideas and people will come to them. Going forward, you will realize what you did before doesn’t make sense anymore and start from scratch. As long as you are venture building and building the venture builder simultaneously, your methods and output will improve, and you will evolve into a venture builder. Not like any other, but unique to your organization.

At Workinlot we design process frameworks that enable companies to collaborate with technology firms and startups. To ensure these designs are optimally developed, we provide iterative project management support in partnership with the organization.

 

Through this collaborative and iterative knowledge transfer, we have helped establish corporate venture capital funds, open innovation platforms, and venture builder structures.

Let's connect and collaborate to identify and validate new opportunities.