Many times, when talking about entrepreneurship, a person comes to mind with an idea for a business model and a long and tortuous road where you always start alone (except for friends and family, the classic 3Fs). Or that to undertake you have to do it from scratch, from “below” and with nothing. But this idea, although it corresponds to a part of the entrepreneurial fabric, does not represent all the opportunities that exist and, even less, of some actors that are increasingly present in the processes of creating new models: (large) companies.
Established and formed companies have always been seen as a focus of capital, customers or distribution. Nothing is further from reality. Corporations are an ecosystem in itself where people and proposals are constantly flying. First of all, ideas are always born within the womb to expand business channels, new models or opportunities to grow.
Secondly, companies have something that is often lacking in new projects: experience and deep knowledge of the environment or sector in which they operate.
This makes companies, in a certain way, start from a great starting point when it comes to undertaking, although mixing these two concepts may sound strange.
Corporations? Undertake?
Many times they start by innovating in a closed way, which is known as intrapreneurship. But this rarely works positively, since efforts are devoted to organizing and executing entrepreneurship programs, but not to giving them continuity. When we talk about disruptive innovation ideas, it is necessary to dedicate a budget, human resources and the involvement of company managers.
Aligning these concepts is not always an easy task, therefore, one of the most acceptable options is the corporate venturing building. In other words, having a unit of external entrepreneurs dedicated to designing, testing and executing the ideas that arise in the company without interfering with your usual roadmap and unites all the benefits of an intrapreneurship program with the feeling of having completed it from start to finish.
The “great” society contributes not only capital, but a deep knowledge of the sector, endorsed by having spent years within it and resources that a new company does not have to use. In other words, they have unfair advantages that make starting a business one of the most difficult things you can face. In this sense, other problems arise when they want to create new business models, such as the lack of agility in the concrete -they are large companies that have another purpose-; the lack of experience in scaling new projects or, most commonly, that there are management teams but with little entrepreneurial experience. Therefore, more and more, they resort to having an external team of venture builders to launch these new projects.
He corporate venture studio, The actor in charge of launching and scaling this project is the counterpart: a more agile team, specialized and focused on creating startups and bringing them to fruition, going through the 4 phases: analyzing the market, designing the product, optimizing it and scaling it independent. The latter makes the process much easier than the former, since it not only offers the agility and speed you need to be able to act as a startup, but in this way you can take advantage of all its advantages without having to dedicate resources or time to it.
In short, corporate venturing building is one of the paths that more and more companies are taking to undertake, being the maximum expression of innovation that is called “open”. Two completely different companies share ideas, projects and paths to create a new viable business path.
Brais Comeseña, Head of Venture of Corporate Lab.
