Venture Building. Market innovation from concept to growth

Over the past three years, we have been facing global changes that are as sudden as they are unforeseen, revealing the fragile nature of our geopolitical and macroeconomic structures and, thus, naturally having enormous repercussions on the markets.

Although there are viable strategies for companies to adapt to people's changing behaviour patterns, it has emerged that it is even more necessary to innovate to remain relevant in one's market or to penetrate new ones by developing new propositions that can respond to an ever-changing environment.

A Corporate can be an obstacle to itself when innovating outside the target market. Because of its shape or size, organisation and resource availability. Or because of specific regulatory constraints or its elasticity in risk management.

Despite having adequate assets and skills, many companies need help finding the speed required to bring their idea to market, with the real risk of offering obsolete products or services and seeing their efforts and investments thwarted. 

Today no one is faster than a Tech company at going to market and driving customer expectations. They do this through exponential technologies, creating new solutions, overcoming regulatory and policy restrictions, and redefining business models.

The new challenge

We assume innovation in business today means structuring and integrating specific skills to anticipate, experiment, test and implement new business models, products and services. In that case, we see how there are five innovation models corporations can adopt to create new revenue streams.

These companies must quickly understand what new opportunities can penetrate their and other related markets. They are often well aware of their resources, and their research and development departments can do incremental innovation. Still, they lack the infrastructure to apply those resources in lateral businesses, which is why building new ventures have proven to be the fastest-growing model over the past five years.

Why innovate with a new venture

Building a new venture means starting a separate company from scratch to capitalise on new markets, technologies and behaviours, diversifying purpose and offerings by creating genuine new businesses that can set new industry standards.

A new brand, team, revenue stream and P&L are created to separate the execution from the Corporate, still retaining the full ownership. Valuable assets are shared, but the execution is entirely differentiated, ensuring that the venture can act agile and streamlined manner and thus address the market quickly.

Thus companies can push beyond their traditional business, identify scalable opportunities,  develop and validate them on a focused, fast and proven market path, play ahead of tech companies, and maintain competitiveness in their market through an ambidextrous organisation.

Creating a new venture makes it possible to prioritise exploration and exploitation equally: one must figure out how to turn business ideas into value propositions that matter to customers and into profitable business models. At the same time, they must grow by scaling or improving existing businesses. 

The ambidextrous organisation allows simultaneous management of the continuum between exploring new and enhancing existing business, which is a crucial prerequisite. This needs to be coupled with a "first-day" culture and a startup spirit, even if the company has thousands of people with multi-million dollar businesses, by taking an incremental approach that reduces risk and transforms the idea from concept (with testable MVPs) to new business ready to scale.

The Venture Builder Program’s benefits

At Sketchin, we have developed our Venture Builder Program, a new frontier of innovation to explore and compete in today's markets. It is not just an accelerator program but an end-to-end approach, starting from exploration and ending with the market release of new products or services.

• Unlike a financial approach, we partner with companies, sharing costs and business risk and receiving royalties or profit fees on successful results.
• We take responsibility from concept design to market launch and provide support throughout the entire business integration.
• We accelerate innovation and, at the same time, enable an internal team to experiment with new ways of working, creating the skills to manage and run the business through shared capabilities.

We also offer the advantage of keeping the venture 100% company-owned, with a development path that can be integrated with the group's strategic choices, oriented to the medium to long-term and therefore future-proof.

Tailored experience and innovation

We have worked as innovation partners with top-tier companies for over four years. We applied our Venture Builder Program based on their specific needs, considering past activities, existing initiatives, project types, and investment capabilities.

We helped Banca Mediolanum start B-Corp Flowe, designing a different and sustainable way of banking with the younger generation and their aspirations. Whilst with Sky, we created a new Telco business and launched the Sky Wifi service, integrating it into the entertainment offering to provide its customers with an E2E experience.

With Fastweb, we evolved a paradigm based on tariff offerings while minimising the impact on internal processes and designed a new fully-digital service model for home connectivity from scratch. 

For a corporate, creating a new venture means opening up to future opportunities that could radically change the course of its history, making it responsive to markets and durable in the medium to long term.