How Corporate Venturing Squads Boost Innovation

Corporate Innovation: How Slow Giants Can Stay Ahead of the Disruption Curve While most corporations are still holding workshops about “embracing innovation,” smaller, hungrier players are already capturing their market share. The irony? Big companies have everything startups don’t, capital, data, infrastructure, and yet they lose to speed. In the GCC, this gap is even more visible. Family businesses and legacy institutions are sitting on decades of advantage, but many still move at a pace the market no longer tolerates. The issue isn’t funding. It’s structure, decision-making, and the absence of an ecosystem that rewards experimentation. According to Fast Company, over 90% of innovation hubs fail to deliver measurable results. Why? Because they operate as isolated experiments instead of embedded engines. Innovation doesn’t work when it’s locked in a department with beanbags and a slogan. At Venture Factore, we work with corporates to redesign that DNA, embedding innovation across business units, aligning it with growth metrics, and connecting it to real partnerships that move the market. The goal isn’t to “think like a startup.” It’s to scale like one, with the precision of an institution. If you’re leading a large organization in a fast-changing region, now is the time to evolve, and set the pace others will have to follow. Let’s talk about making your innovation strategy profitable, not performative. #VentureFactore #CorporateInnovation #VentureCapital #Strategy #MENAInvestments #PrivateEquity #GCCBusiness #ScaleUps #Transformation #Leadership

What if your next innovation partner wasn’t one startup, but a squad of corporates + startups working together? WEF recently highlighted Corporate Venturing Squads - multi-entity alliances that pool risk, knowledge, and capital to tackle complex challenges. Key takeaways: It dilutes burden and amplifies reach - no single company carries the entire risk or cost. It enables cross-industry insight, especially for grand challenges (climate, mobility, smart cities). It demands new coordination skills: shared governance, neutral leadership, aligned incentives. If your corporate venturing playbook still assumes “1 corporate → 1 startup” you might be missing the next wave of scalable collaboration. https://lnkd.in/ePv4Sthb

McKinsey research on scaling companies identifies a critical transition most founders miss: "To scale further, a company needs to make the huge, hard transition from the charismatic to the industrial—from founding-team led product and sales processes to a scalable, industrialised approach." The study analyzed 3,164 funded companies and found that 78% fail to scale even after achieving product-market fit. The reason? Early success often requires only a "handful of evangelists building and selling a product to a tight network of homogenous customers." That approach—which the research calls "charismatic success"—works beautifully until it doesn't. The warning signs are subtle: sales concentrated across very few people, repeated challenges selling outside your core segment quietly ignored as "tomorrow's problem," manufacturing partnerships that worked at 7-figures struggling at 8-figures. McKinsey identifies what needs to change: your engine room (product, manufacturing, go-to-market), your accelerators (market expansion, M&A, partnerships), and your cockpit (talent, data, top team). The kicker? "It can be several quarters, or even years, before it is obvious that a company has failed to transition...putting back the date of a successful IPO by many years, if not indefinitely." By the time you notice you're stagnating, you're already behind. Your Monday Moment reflection: Is your company still running on "charismatic" founder-led processes? Or are you proactively building industrial systems before you hit the ceiling? Source: McKinsey & Company (2024). "The scale-up conundrum: Evolving startups from founder-led growth to industrialised scalability." https://lnkd.in/eeGqkWKQ #MondayMoment #OrganizationalCultureDesign #ScalingStartups #FounderLedGrowth #IndustrialScaling #BiotechScaling #GrowthStrategy #StartupLeadership

🚀 Startups vs Corporates — Culture & Innovation: Two Worlds, One Goal 💼 Every professional experiences this question at some point: 👉 Should I work at a startup or a corporate? Both drive innovation — but in very different ways. Let’s decode it 👇 🏢 Corporate Culture: ✔️ Structured processes, stability & global reach. ✔️ Strong policies, clear hierarchies, and defined roles. ✔️ Innovation exists — but it’s often layered with approvals and risk management. 💡 Innovation here is steady, strategic, and built for scale. 🚀 Startup Culture: ✔️ Fast-paced, dynamic, and experimental. ✔️ Fail fast, learn faster — ideas can become products overnight. ✔️ Everyone wears multiple hats, and creativity thrives under constraints. 💡 Innovation here is bold, disruptive, and fueled by passion. ✨ The Real Difference: Startups innovate by breaking rules. Corporates innovate by building systems. Both are necessary — startups spark change, corporates sustain it. 🎯 Takeaway: If you seek speed, creativity, and impact, you’ll love startups. If you prefer structure, stability, and scale, corporates are your zone. But the real magic? → When corporate professionals think like startups and startups adopt corporate discipline. Which culture do you think drives innovation better — startups or corporates? 👇 #Startups #CorporateCulture #Innovation #Leadership #CareerGrowth #FutureOfWork

Death in the Corporate Machine (and the new path forward) Open Innovation brought ideas in but most stalled in the machine of big business. They were treated as side projects, not the real work of serious operators. The tell? Everyone started calling them “cool.” (When was the last time you heard that word in a boardroom?) Open Innovation was a step forward, but it wasn’t enough. Polynodal Innovation goes further. It connects corporations directly into the venture economy, where ideas and capabilities flow in and out, compounding value. This isn’t outsourcing innovation or farming it off to someone else. It’s a rewiring of how business is built for speed, scale, and resilience. The problem has never been intent. It’s structure. Corporates have scattered their efforts across CVCs, labs, and one-off partnerships hoping the pieces would somehow add up. They rarely did. Polynodal Innovation replaces that fragmentation with a connected, enterprise-wide system for growth built on deliberate, high-fit engagements with startups, VCs, and scaleups. It’s not about opening the gate. It’s about operating in the wild and having the courage to climb faster, and go further. Question: How do you make innovation core business, not corporate tourism? Ibex | Antler | McKinsey & Company #Innovation #Growth #Leadership #CorporateVenture #PolynodalInnovation #Strategy

In today’s fragmented world, #Collaboration isn’t just smart — it’s essential for tackling global challenges. 🤝 #CorporateVenturing Squads (CV Squads) — multi-company alliances between corporates and startups — are redefining how we share knowledge, scale ideas, and advance #ESG goals. Research from IESE’s Mª Julia Prats, Josemaria Siota and Beatriz Camacho Ávila, PhD shows that over 260 global corporates are already turning to CV Squads to accelerate #Innovation and embrace #OpenInnovation across borders. 🔗 Read the article in the World Economic Forum: https://lnkd.in/ePv4Sthb

The latest iteration of corporate venturing, Corporate Venturing Squads bring multiple companies and #startups together to pool knowledge, facilitate access to capital and scale #innovation across borders. This new model is a pioneering approach to value creation against a challenging global economic backdrop. Read more from IESE Business School Mª Julia Prats Josemaria Siota and Beatriz Camacho Ávila, PhD: https://lnkd.in/e_MNBx7x

🚀 Why established companies should partner with startups Startups aren’t just “small businesses” — they’re engines of agility, creativity, and future-proof thinking. In today’s rapidly shifting digital and AI landscape, that agility is priceless. Some reasons collaboration makes sense: Innovation at speed – rapid iteration and testing without layers of approval. Fresh perspectives – bold approaches and outside expertise that corporates may overlook. Flexibility – adapting to challenges and pivots is built into their DNA. Shared risk – corporates can experiment without carrying the full R&D cost. Future readiness – entrepreneurial energy and emerging tech help organizations stay competitive. Partnerships between startups and corporates aren’t just useful — they’re becoming essential to drive innovation and resilience in uncertain times. 👉 As leaders, let’s keep growing, learning, and thinking outside the box — exploring ideas and innovations that solve real problems together. #Innovation #TechStartups #Collaboration #FutureOfWork #Agility

🚀 Looking back — and ahead: The Impact of Venture Clienting Report Last year, we released the first-ever Impact of Venture Clienting Report, mapping 66,000 relationships between corporations and startups. It was a milestone moment - the first time anyone had quantified how large companies are adopting venture clienting and what patterns emerge when collaboration truly scales. Some of the insights still surprise me today: 🌍 Geography matters: Larger countries show a strong domestic collaboration bias, while smaller ones internationalize faster, often out of necessity. 🤝 Collaboration pays off: Corporations that work with startups more actively tend to attract more VC-backed innovation and build more international partnerships. 🏆 Leaders pull ahead: A small group of top corporations are outpacing the rest - not just in how many startups they work with, but in how strategically they do it. The report helped put numbers behind what many innovation leaders had felt intuitively: venture clienting works, and it’s reshaping how corporations innovate. 📅 This November, we’ll release the next edition, diving even deeper - 4x more data, new rankings, and a closer look at how leading companies are evolving their venture clienting approach. If you’re passionate about open innovation, startup collaboration, or just curious how the corporate–startup landscape is changing, stay tuned.

Collaboration between startups and corporates is becoming one of the most powerful ways to unlock innovation in Europe. The latest EIC report confirms something many of us see every day: money alone doesn’t make the difference. The real breakthrough happens when corporates open their doors, offering infrastructure, networks, expertise and a stage where startups can prove themselves at scale. That’s when ideas stop being prototypes and start becoming solutions with market impact. What really stood out to me is how much structure and people matter. Clear goals, the courage to experiment and above all the commitment of leadership and cross-functional teams make collaborations successful. And it’s not just the big players who can shape the future, smaller corporates, when the fit is right, can drive just as much impact as industry giants. Agrifoodtech is a good example. It’s not yet the top-performing sector in terms of corporate–startup deals, but its potential is huge. From sustainability to biotechnology and digitalisation of food systems, the need for innovation is systemic and urgent. Here, collaboration is not only an opportunity, it’s a necessity to accelerate solutions that can transform how we produce, distribute and consume food. With more than 1,500 engagements and a satisfaction rate above 92%, the EIC Corporate Partnership Programme shows that Europe has the ingredients to close the gap between its world-class research and global market competitiveness. here the full article: https://lnkd.in/dn4hcgYR