Venturing Activities in Corporate Innovation: Types, Features and Success Factors

Corporate Venturing, i.e. corporate engagement in external and internal ventures, plays an evermore critical role in fueling the innovation engine of larger companies. Most of those activities have a non-incremental innovation focus in nature, commonly targeted at

• bringing about radical, yet sustaining opportunities to adapt/extend the current core business (e.g. digitalizing products, services or operating models)
• exploring novel disruptive opportunities (e.g. technologies, business models or customer experiences)

As pointed out earlier, it is recommended to accomodate a dedicated set of venturing tools, which fits the defined innovation strategy, within a central Explorative Innovation Unit, anchored at corporate level. This proves to be a major lever to strengthen a company’s explorative innovation capabilities, while at the same making sure, all related activities are pursued with high alignment in terms of the overall purpose and objectives.

Recently, some worthwile publications on that issue have been published. As they have proved useful for helping conceptualize, set up and manage Corporate Innovation Venturing, they are shared in the following, featuring some of their key visuals (please click to enlarge) – without further addition or comment.

Corporate Venturing: Achieving Profitable Growth Through Startups (Whitepaper) – by IESE Business School

Classification of Corporate Venturing tools by cost of capital, time frame to obtain results, degree of intergration and phase of innovation:

Types and features of Corporate Venturing tools:

Open Innovation: Building, Scaling and Consolidating (Whitepaper) – by IESE Business School

Average estimated cost to launch an opportunity funnel classified by Corporate Venturing tool:

Levels of Corporate Venturing implementation in the organizational structure:

How Can Corporates Engage in Venturing? – by Lutz Göcke

Types and organizational setups of Corporate Venturing tools:

Expectation management and success factors:

Startup Investment Guide – by Board of Innovation

Venture maturity level assessment:

Adventures in Corporate Venturing – by strategy + business