We see that venture building is increasingly becoming the go to answer for corporate innovation pains. It is hard to say that we are 100% objective, however we wouldn’t be entrepreneurs if we didn’t go out there to prove a point. So here are our top 3 reasons why we love venture building:

Venture Building ties everything together

Everybody loves a good story. It’s even better when there are multiple plot lines that effortlessly combine in the end. Venture building is exactly that. It ties up open innovation with new business development, with spinoffs, with investments, with culture and more. In an ideal scenario, the mothership sets vision and the venture builder discovers and executes strategy. Eventually the mothership evolves, vision adapts and cycle repeats.

Venture Building creates gravity

Future is all about exponential growth. Standalone innovation initiatives yield linear growth. The more you put in, the more you get in return. With venture building, internal efforts create synergies with ecosystem involvements. Your wins create more deal flow, more deal flow justifies higher resource allocation which in turn increases capacity. Eventually the venture builder becomes the black hole of all the initiatives and people contributing to the mothership vision.

Venture Building is self sustaining

In order for a business model to be self sustaining, the outputs of some key activities, should be inputs of others. The value delivery creates new key resources. Customer segments are fans, and fans are key partners. When it works, it’s a beautiful mess of connections. A venture builder eventually becomes a self sustaining ecosystem. In the organized chaos of people, ideas and action, new connections are made, old connections are laid to rest. 

The problem with venture building is that you can’t launch a venture builder overnight, unless you have significant money, time and other resources to spare. You evolve into a venture builder.

A venture builder is a perfect orchestration of strategic alignment, entrepreneurial mindset, resource dedication, autonomy and accountability. The most critical here being the entrepreneurial mindset, which is agile, resourceful and customer centric. One that is difficult to find in house and very expensive to hire and retain. However, the mindset is present in every person, they just need to remember how to utilize it. So appoint, empower and pick them back up when they fall. It will take some time, but this is the fastest and most frugal route.

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.