Venture Studio Blueprint

Sliding Line

  • Exevion was brought in by one of the UK’s biggest corporate research institutes to design the blueprint and create the business case for their Venture Studio.

    The client has a long history of developing early-stage ideas but wanted to be part of the complete end-to-end process of commercialising them. They also wanted to benefit from internally fostering ideas rather than returning them to the market. A corporate Venture Studio is a way for a large, established business to do several things:

    • Create start-ups that provide supplementary and complementary services to the corporate business and their partners;

    • Create new revenue streams that can supplement other lower-risk investment vehicles;

    • Leverage existing expertise using an alternative operating model that is set up for agility and speed of innovation;

    • Deploy experienced people and facilities to accelerate spin-out businesses. For example, using expertise that wouldn’t be available to businesses not backed by a large corporate;

    • Deploy capital in a tax-efficient way for the corporate launching these programmes.

  • Exevion delivered the design of the blueprint across the following workstreams:

    • Studio Vision – the vision for the Venture Studio needed to enhance what the business already did. It needed to be something that could be stood behind publicly and internally. We worked with key stakeholders to define the vision, benefits and principles it would use to operate;

    • Understand the Business – once the vision was defined, we focused on understanding the existing business processes that the Venture Studio could work alongside. This keeps the Venture Studio efficient by piggybacking onto what was already successful;

    • Investment Process – we then designed the investment process that is used to take ideas from concepts to commercial products. This included phased investment through a stage gate model to support ideas without over-investing in projects that might not succeed;

    • Core Capabilities – using input from stakeholders, we detailed the capabilities that were required to deliver the Venture Studio. For example, the structure and governance to make decisions and the facilities and environment to encourage a fast-paced culture;

    • Financials – the high-level financial model for the initial build and investment into projects was outlined. Returns were broken down across successful projects generating revenue, brokerage fees from facilitating co-investment and unrealised investments that were still to generate return.

  • We produced the Venture Studio Blueprint that concentrated on 3 key areas:

    1. A business plan for the Venture Studio, which was presented to an investment committee to agree seed investment for the accelerator;

    2. A plan to validate the initial blueprint, this will be used in the next phase of the project to align stakeholders in the business, and agree on how to resource the programme with people and facilities;

    3. A plan for partnerships, this will be used to attract partners to co-invest in the build of the Venture Studio. This added a second layer of external validation to the plan.

  • Corporates will often concentrate on what has made them successful, which, over time will mean stability at the cost of speed and agility. To combat this, businesses can launch corporate Venture Studios, to support early-stage start-ups or internal teams to test and learn new ideas or concepts quickly.

    Corporate Venture Studios need a process in place that will allow them to repeatedly make start-ups successful. This comes from a combination of using existing expertise, facilities and processes in a new, fast-paced way.

    Our comprehensive Innovation experience ensures that established corporates can leverage start-up capabilities to move quickly whilst using their existing knowledge and experience to commercialise ideas.