What is corporate venturing?

Olivier Beaujean
3 min readAug 2, 2022

--

Today I want to talk about corporate venturing and how it can benefit your business. Thanks to my experience in the field, I learned that partnering up with young ventures allows big corporations to acquire adaptability skills, especially in responding to shifts that arise in today’s fast-changing environment.

For these reasons, we decided to create a tool like the Novable platform, bringing together a large number of resources and capital with innovative ideas.

Corporate venturing is an innovation and growth strategy that allows large and well-established companies, like yours, to partner up with one or more small, innovative startups to form a joint venture. The purpose is to effectively use your corporate assets and resources in order to produce new products and services.

Entering a corporate venture enables the access of your business into new markets, experimenting with new technologies, different strategies, and generating new revenue streams for a fraction of the cost and risk of doing it alone.

Considering the rapidly changing market context dominated by millions and millions of disruptive startups, corporate venturing is critical for accelerating your company’s corporate innovation and financial success. Here is why:

  • Efficiency. Corporate ventures give established firms the same flexibility, autonomy, and agility as startups when it comes to exploring new prospects.
  • More opportunities. Many new ideas are usually dismissed in big organizations because they are “irrelevant” or “not related to the primary business objectives”. As a result, many businesses are clinging to old products that could be rendered obsolete by disruptive startups in the near future.
  • Broader knowledge acquisition. Companies are required to learn about new and emerging markets when looking for new business prospects. This leads to new insights that can extend their perspective and provide information that can be applied to the existing market, allowing them to better serve future customers.
  • Lower risk. Companies can test new ideas in a contained environment by creating corporate ventures. This is far less dangerous than trying a new concept, technology, or business strategy across the entire organization, which may be expensive and damaging to the brand. Ideas and concepts that work can be quickly scaled up, while those that don’t can be shut down without causing any significant harm.
Source: Shutterstock.com

“Efficiency is doing things right, effectiveness is doing the right things.” Peter Drucker

When it comes to corporate venturing, it’s critical that you anticipate obstacles and have strategies in place to quickly overcome them. The main challenge would be choosing the right venture. Many businesses struggle to focus on the right criteria when selecting new ventures. This will undoubtedly lead to problems in the future, such as not receiving the desired returns or not developing the enterprise using the appropriate tools.

This happens because normally innovation managers, like you, would have to use Google, which provides an enormous amount of results, leading to confusion and frustration. No one doubts that Google is useful for many aspects, but when it comes to efficient scouting, the tool offered by Novable does a much better and faster job.

If you’re interested in the topic and want to know more about how corporate venturing can boost corporate innovation, stay tuned for my next article!

In the meantime, follow Novable on LinkedIn or Twitter to keep up with the latest news!

--

--

Olivier Beaujean

Entrepreneur, co-founder http://novable.com, #corporateinnovation Married, 2 kids, love cooking and my friends! Let's meet, online or offline.