Refinement of a corporate venture building unit for a German SME

Challenge

Corporate venture building units are a powerful tool for small- and medium-sized companies to build horizon 2 and 3 innovations in an externalized development path. But they are also knitted to larger, long-term investments. Against this background, the challenge of our client was to refine existing venture building activities with inclusion of different external growth paths, long-term KPIs, financial planning and definition of suitable roles within the venture building team.

Infront approach

Our corporate venture building framework includes the pillars strategy, legal and governance. It has been developed through an analysis of best-practices from more than 20 corporate venture building units in the DACH region based on our hallmark study “Corporates on the trails of Startups” that we conduct with CAPITAL magazine. In the project, we also included a highly experienced innovation unit veteran, who build up and scaled corporate ventures within the Volkswagen Group. Our working mechanism in the project was a combination of regular sparring formats with selective deep-dives where we took operative responsibility of work packages.

Results

Refined venture building approach with respect to strategic orientation, processes, KPIs and organizational roles
Formulation of long-term development goals for the venture building unit

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