When multiple corporates come together to build a new venture, the potential benefits are huge: complementary capabilities, shared resources, diversified risk, and a stronger position to enter new markets.
Done right, co-building ventures enables each partner to achieve more than they could alone.
But the reality is often messier. Even when intentions are aligned, differences in culture, governance, pace, and priorities can quickly surface. Each corporate partner brings its own decision-making structure, risk appetite, and internal politics to the table.
So, what separates co-venture success stories from the many that never make it out of the gate? And how can leaders navigate the added complexity, persevere through the inevitable friction, and ultimately build ventures that deliver real, lasting rewards?
In a recent Innov8rs Learning Lab session, Sebastian Mueller, Founding Partner, Strategy and Ventures at MING Labs, shared practical frameworks, cautionary tales, and tested strategies to help you approach corporate co-venturing with more clarity, confidence, and impact.
Sebastian Müller
Founding Partner, Strategy and Ventures at MING Labs
Why Strategic Corporate Venture Partnerships Matter
Co-venturing opens the door to tangible advantages that are often impossible for one company to achieve alone. For instance, when one partner brings deep regulatory expertise and the other offers access to a new market or technical capabilities, the venture benefits from a more complete foundation.
As the African proverb goes, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” This wisdom captures the essence of successful partnerships that combine strengths to unlock new markets, accelerate learning, and spread risk. By sharing capability and capital, you can create something greater than the sum of its parts.
Still, co-venturing isn’t without its challenges. Missteps in alignment, governance, or execution can quickly derail even the most promising collaborations. As Sebastian warns, “The most likely result if not managed well, is that actually no venture will get created. It will get stuck somewhere in the process, and the whole program will be defunded at some point.” The starting place to avoid such outcomes is to define which type of partnership fits best for the specific problem you are trying to solve.
Choosing the Right Co-Venture Model
Not all approaches suit every context. Choosing the right co-venture model means understanding shared goals, contributions, and the level of complexity all parties are prepared to manage. Three models appear most frequently in practice, each with distinct benefits and challenges.
The Senior Partner / Junior Partner Model
The Senior Partner / Junior Partner Model is the one Sebastian sees working best in practice. Here, one corporate takes the lead. They drive the venture, invest more heavily, and contribute key resources. In addition, a junior partner adds a complementary asset or capability, such as customer access or subject matter expertise.
“This works really well, especially if the senior partner has strong venture experience,” Sebastian notes. “They can lead the process and governance, and the junior partner is happy to be along for the ride.” The benefits? Clear accountability and faster decisions. However, this setup can also lead to imbalance if the junior partner isn’t empowered or if the senior partner lacks venture-building credibility.
For example, a Dutch bank partnered with a global shipping agent to digitize port operations. The bank led the venture and brought industry contacts, while the shipping company provided operational know-how and served as the first customer. Despite not formalizing strategic alignment upfront, their underlying goals aligned naturally, and the venture exited successfully at a 12x ARR multiple.
The Equal Contributor Model
The Equal Contributor Model assumes both partners bring similar value to the table and share responsibilities equally. While this structure looks great on paper, it’s often harder to make work.
“We’ve seen this go wrong when one side feels the other isn’t pulling their weight,” says Sebastian. “Then the blaming starts: ‘You didn’t put in enough people’ or ‘You didn’t deliver what you promised.'”
This model requires high mutual trust, tight coordination, and organizational maturity on both sides. When it works, it creates shared ownership and balanced influence. However, disagreements and misalignment are inevitable, and this approach can amplify friction and lead to breakdowns if not managed carefully. To succeed, it’s crucial to establish clear governance and a shared understanding of goals from the outset.
For example, one co-venture between a French industrial equipment company and a global reinsurer started with equal footing, but quickly ran into issues. One side contributed less consistently, sparking resentment. The focus shifted from shared goals to debates over IP value and feasibility. Eventually, the reinsurer pulled out, and the equipment company pivoted to acquiring a startup instead.
The Consortium Model
The Consortium Model involves three or more corporate partners collaborating around a large, often industry-wide challenge. These ventures typically span value chains or involve sustainability, data-sharing, or infrastructure transformation. “I’ve never seen a consortium work without an external, neutral facilitator,” Sebastian emphasizes.
With so many voices at the table in a consortium, a clear lead and a strong governance framework are absolutely essential. “If you believe getting one corporate to execute is hard, try doing it with two or three. It is exponentially harder the more partners you add to the team,” warns Sebastian. The upside is scale and systemic impact. The tradeoff? More stakeholder management, slower execution, and the risk of lowest-common-denominator decision-making.
Whatever model you choose, Sebastian advises asking the hard questions early: Is this the correct setup for our strategic goals? Are we aligned in our appetite and capacity? If the answers aren’t clear, no amount of structure will save the venture from friction down the road.
The Five Elements of Successful Corporate Venture Partnerships
Successful co-ventures don’t just happen. They are designed intentionally and deliberately around five foundational elements. These aspects work together to reduce friction, enhance collaboration, and increase the odds that a venture will move beyond the drawing board and deliver real results.
1. Strategic Alignment
Before anything else, the partners must clearly articulate why they are doing this and what they hope to achieve. That means agreeing on the strategic rationale for the venture, the vision of success, and what each party stands to gain.
Sebastian emphasizes that this alignment must surpass superficial enthusiasm: “What is our definition of success? What are our shared goals? What’s our shared ambition?”
The venture will likely unravel later if the partners cannot answer these questions upfront or if their motivations are in conflict.
2. Effective Governance
Good governance isn’t about red tape. It’s about clarity, speed, and accountability. Early agreements should cover how the venture board is staffed, how investment decisions are made, and how conflicts will be resolved.
You also need to define the senior sponsors, each partner’s roles and responsibilities, and how decisions will escalate when things get stuck. Involving senior leaders who understand and own the strategic vision can be the difference between a temporary disagreement and a permanent breakdown.
3. Shared Risk and Rewards
If the venture is going to work, everyone involved must feel like they have skin in the game and an upside to their involvement. The cap table is not just about reflecting who brought what to the table, but also about incentivizing the right kind of ongoing collaboration.
“I always try to make it very clear in the beginning that cap table design is about incentivizing the ongoing relationship,” Sebastian says.
That means leaving room for the venture team, future founders, and potential outside investors, not just the corporate partners.
4. Focused Execution
Ventures don’t succeed on vision alone. They require focus, discipline, and a team that can deliver. This starts with assembling a dedicated team empowered to develop its own identity and operating rhythm.
Momentum stalls when team members fall back into legacy corporate habits and timelines. Instead, the venture team needs space to define its own culture and stick to a shared, agile execution process that enables learning and iteration.
5. Value Creation
Once the foundation is in place, you can focus on value creation. This includes setting KPIs, measuring progress, aligning investments to milestones, and surfacing synergies across parent organizations.
But value creation is the output, not the starting point.
“You don’t want to start with this first,” Sebastian advises. “You really have to start with the strategic alignment and the governance piece, and then start to put in risk and reward sharing, execution alignment, and value creation alignment.”
Each of these five elements builds on the others. Skipping one weakens the whole system. But when done right, they unlock the true potential of corporate co-venture partnerships.
Making Partnerships Succeed in Practice
Successful co-ventures do not emerge from luck or vision alone. They require deliberate design, patient alignment, and a strong foundation of trust. Sometimes, the smartest move is to walk away early. “We’ve already pulled out of two potential setups that were not ready,” Sebastian explains. When motivations are unclear or teams are misaligned from the start, continuing often leads to wasted effort.
The most resilient partnerships are forged when companies take the time to align their ambitions, define governance early, share risk and reward fairly, and empower teams to operate with clarity and purpose.
That means facing difficult conversations up front, revisiting assumptions regularly, and staying committed even when the process gets hard. When done well, co-ventures can unlock new markets, build new capabilities, and create durable competitive advantages for everyone involved.
So if you’re considering a venture partnership, pause before you proceed. Focus first on getting the setup right because the work you put in at the start sets the stage for whether your venture stalls or scales.
