Maximise Venturing Potential.
Reflecting on the key takeaway from last week's forum conversations on Corporate Innovation in Australia and what they mean for maximising future venturing success.
Last week, a forum held at the business school sparked dynamic conversation on growth, self-disruption, and innovation. As Australian corporations navigate a landscape shaped by slow economic growth, market concentration, and shifting consumer demands, innovation has become a non-negotiable for staying competitive. Reflecting on conversations, here are four actionable lessons / takeaways to help maximise your corporate venturing investments and build lasting ventures.
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Define Your Focus: Know Where to Play, What Success Is & How to Win
Corporate innovation often falters because of a lack of focus and an unclear rationale for its reason for priority. Usually, this leads to too many ventures trying to tackle multiple problems at once or too few ventures receiving meaningful resources (including time) to attempt to solve an enterprise or customer problem reasonably. Either way, the potential effectiveness of your venturing efforts is diluted.
Align your ventures with your company's strengths and focus on well-defined opportunity areas that can solve bold, high-impact problems. Less can sometimes be more—concentrate resources where they matter most. In doing so, you avoid trying to be all things to everyone. If you are unprepared to write many investment cheques to build a broad strategic options portfolio, start with a more narrow, well-defined opportunity area or sandpit to suit your enterprise's appetite and capability.
Face Risks Head-On: It is about being risk-aware, not avoiding them
With your sandpit built, the next challenge is preparing for the inherent risks of venturing—because avoiding them is not an option.
Risk is inherent in corporate venturing, whether you are only pursuing one new venture or building out a complete portfolio. However, being risk-aware separates innovation efforts with the most significant potential for success from those most likely to fail.
Re-framing risk awareness as a proactive strategy enables companies to be prepared and act decisively when opportunities and challenges arise rather than avoiding uncertainty.
Try asking yourself What must go right?
Often, I have found that building durable and efficient "fast-fail" mechanisms into your innovation/venturing and related governance activities is effective in quickly identifying and pivoting away from non-viable or aligned ideas.
Seek out ventures that cannot be replicated, quickly. Boost them with your own unfair advantages.
Knowing where you will play and the risks that will come with it, the next priority is ensuring your ventures are defensible. In today's competitive landscape, it's not enough to create something valuable—it needs to be something that others can't easily replicate. Without a clear competitive moat, new ventures may be reproduced or outpaced by your established competitors or new nimble challengers.
For startups, defendability usually involves leveraging intellectual property, proprietary techniques, and technologies. However, in a corporate context, focusing on ventures, whether you are building or investing, should be able to extend existing unfair advantages—for example, your existing loyal customer base, dominant market position, and proprietary data and ecosystems. If you have limited resources for innovation and venturing, focus on those challenges or opportunities where you can leverage those advantages rapidly.
Be ready to challenge the status quo
Venture success requires more than great ideas—it demands a willingness to question the status quo. True innovation often challenges an organisation's systems, processes, and beliefs, potentially disrupting or cannibalising from within.
Where bureaucracy and legacy systems can stifle innovation, leaders must create an environment where new ideas are welcomed and invested, not just from a dollar perspective but to support the long-term commitment required. To achieve this, particularly in its early stages, it is prudent to establish separate governance and enablement structures for innovation and venturing activities that allow them to operate with the agility of a startup while benefiting from corporate resources. But be prepared to pivot, divest or sunset those ventures that do not align with evolving priorities.
In Conclusion
In today's environment, corporate innovation and venturing are necessary not just for your future growth story but to sustain your long-term unfair advantage. Importantly in brings the enterprise:
Resilience in Uncertain Markets: Innovation diversifies revenue streams and positions companies to weather economic shifts.
Extend Competitive Edge: Ventures create new capabilities that traditional competitors and market entrants cannot easily match.
Future-Proofing: Corporate innovation ensures companies remain relevant as industries transform and customer expectations evolve.
Looking to maximise your venturing potential?
Whether you are already making innovation investments or still determining where it all sits in your priorities, to help maximise venture success, consider
How are you focusing your investment on areas that matter most?
How are you preparing/handling the risks inherent in innovation?
How are your ventures designed to be defensible from day one?
What legacy assumptions might be holding you back from creating true innovation / self-disruption?
Let's start a conversation.
Whether you're leading corporate innovation efforts or navigating the complexities of launching ventures within an established organisation, it would be great to hear your perspective.
Drop your thoughts below, share your own key learning or reach out—because the future belongs to those ready to challenge the norms and build ventures that last.
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