Corporate Venture Builder: The Rise of Venture-Building-As-A-Service
Over the past 25 years since the first appearance of the term “Venture Builder” in the handbook of an entrepreneur dictionary, several other approaches have emerged from this business model. A venture builder, at its heart, is dedicated to systematically create new start-ups, which it helps grow and succeed by applying its expertise, resources, and network. Their activities involve primarily identifying business ideas, building teams, finding capital, helping govern or manage the ventures as well as providing shared services.
A corporate venture builder differs from a traditional venture builder by co-creating a startup together with a large company. Although these start-ups are owned by the parent company, they can be fundamentally different in terms of values, business models, and capabilities. In Europe, Solytic by Vattenfall and The Park Playground by Telenet are just some examples of many other corporate ventures that have helped their parent company to avoid disruption. The corporate venture building model, also known as venture-building-as-service, offers therefore a new approach to drive innovation where large companies and startups collaborate rather than compete. As companies grow larger, their tendency to avoid risk increases proportionally and they become less agile. When it comes to big brands, the risk of damaging their reputation can be even worse than speculating their finances. With new agile startups entering the market every day at an accelerating speed with their innovations, companies need to be able to innovate even faster to stay ahead of changes in the market. However, while larger companies need to diversify and innovate to stay relevant, they are usually held back by the burden of bureaucracy and risk management. The advantage of corporate venture building is that it allows a larger company to operate at the speed of a startup to promote its external growth without disrupting its established internal processes. By working with corporate venture builders, companies can develop and test new technologies as well as service solutions with less costs and minimized risk to their core business. Likewise, collaborating with large companies presents numerous advantages for start-ups such as market knowledge and experience, established networks and brand reputation along with other considerable resources.
Today, corporate venture building is becoming a significantly important strategy for companies to diversify rapidly and capitalize on innovation. As a result, working with a corporate venture builder enables the company to unlock new technologies, develop future-proof business models and enter new markets quickly.
As Europe’s rising startup ecosystem is becoming more diverse every year, here we summarized Europe’s top 20 corporate venture builders for you:
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