Innov8rs Connect on Venture Building & Scaling (2-4 November 2021)

A business is a system. Law #1 of designing new systems: “optimising parts of a system will pessimise the whole system.” It’s the reason why applying lean start-up principles to new, unimagined market spaces causes ventures to fail – and to waste a lot of time and money along the way. Hear from Milan Samani, Partner at TIL Ventures (clients include Barclays, BMW, Mars, Pearson, IFC) along with Tom Manuel, Founder of Calmly Resolve, Rob Smith, venture creator and Head of Behavioural Finance at Barclays and Nick Miller, Fin-tech partnerships lead at Barclays Group Innovation, speak about Integrated Venture Engineering – the emerging practice of engineering new business systems.

Milan is a partner at TIL Ventures, using ‘Integrated Venture Engineering’ to build new market-creating ventures with and for global corporations. Clients include Barclays, BMW, Mars, Pearson, BlackRock and the IFC. Ventures include peer-to-peer car sharing (UK), lending to the underbanked (US), investing for individuals of ‘normal net worth’ (UK), nutritious foods for the India mass market, job-readiness skills for Latin America and steering the off-grid solar sector (Africa and Asia) towards profitability. TIL’s Partners teach at Said Business School and Cornell and are widely published in Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Wall Street Journal and the Guardian. Tom is one of the co-founders of Calmly; an online platform that helps claimants and defendants settle cases without resorting to legal action. Over the past six months, Calmly has dealt with over £250k of disputes, and we’re just getting started. Prior to founding Calmly, Tom started his career in banking and then joined TIL Ventures, working on ventures in India, the US and East Africa. He’s now using ‘Integrated Venture Engineering’ to build his own new market-creating venture. Nick is a FinTech Partnerships & Strategic Programmes Manager within Barclays’ Group Innovation Office. His remit is to develop revenue generating partnerships with leading FinTechs globally, as well create profitable new ventures within the bank, typically focusing on APIs, AI and Blockchain technology domains. Nick started at Barclays on the graduate scheme in 2016 and was previously a Product Manager within the Wealth business before joining the Group Innovation Office. He holds a number of investment qualifications from the Chartered Institute of Securities & Investment as well the Investment Management Certificate from the CFA society. Robert Smith is Head of Behavioural Finance at Barclays, where he focuses on investor behaviour and decision making. He is responsible for the risk profiling framework at Barclays Wealth & Investment Management, implementing insights on how our judgement is affected by emotional factors and market conditions. Robert joined Barclays in 2011 and has helped develop Barclays Wealth and Investment Management’s market leading Investment Philosophy, drawing on behavioural portfolio theory, the psychology of judgment and decision making, and decision sciences. He has spent time providing specialist support to the Wealth Management and Private Banking businesses in the UK and is currently responsible for incorporating behavioural finance insight to help improve customer’s investment decision making. Prior to joining Barclays Robert spent 2 years at Standard Bank, a large South African Investment bank, in London. Robert is a CFA charter holder holds a bachelors degree in Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering from Warwick University.

Pre-mature scaling is one of the top reasons for failure of new products. Innovation teams scale too quickly when they build fancy features, spend money to acquire few 100 customers and get busy in operations – before they’ve nailed down the product and business model. This is why you need a “throwaway” MVP. Something that can be launched in 4-8 weeks and allows you to LEARN. So before you scale, you have to answer all the unknowns like: 1. How to acquire new customers? What message and channel work for us? 2. How to make them active and understand why they are active? 3. Understand why others are in-active? 4. What are users doing on the product? What features are they using? 5. What is their Ahaa moment? 6. How to convert active users to paid users? 7. How much are they willing to spend to solve their problem? In this session, we will talk about “throw-away” MVP hacks: – How to launch in 4-8 weeks? NO-CODE revolution – How “throwaway” MVP is built by hackers and scale-up products are build by architects – How to use data to answer all product unknowns before you scale

An Innovation Strategist at Lean Apps, Narjeet seems to be in love with experimentation and pre-totyping. He has tested new business ideas in Pharma, Healthcare, Insurance, Automotive, Retail, Telecom, Music, Manufacturing and more. He has tested ideas both for physical and digital products across B2B, B2B2C and B2C. His mantra: SELL it before you BUILD it.

Right from the first step of a corporate venture’s path towards scaling, there are important milestones that need to be kept into account: – Team setup in different stages – Metrics to track in different stages – Governance structure – Key moment to spin-in or spin-out and the legal implications – Operational setup at various stages – Collaboration/link between mothership and venture – And more. Based on Thomas and Bundl’s experience of running 200+ tracks in the corporate innovation space, he’ll share the pathway to scale for corporate ventures that currently holds the most potential for success that you can follow with your own ventures.

Thomas is an entrepreneur with a focus on Corporate Venturing. He firmly believes that today’s corporations have a critical advantage in responding to fast-evolving customers. In 2008, he co-founded the Bundl, which is active on a global scale with a team of 45+ people. Having a portfolio of 200+ corporate innovation projects and joint ventures, he and the Bundl team have gained unparalleled expertise by creating new ventures from scratch. Recent corporate venturing tracks have seen him take an active role in successful ventures like ownskincare.eu with Beiersdorf, theparkplayground.com with Telenet, and optimile.eu with BNP Paribas Fortis.

As we all know, corporates are not good at creating new businesses from innovation. Their success rate in building sizable, profitable businesses is not higher than the success rate of VC-backed greenfield startups – despite all their assets such as a customer base, brand and reputation, working supply chains and functional expertise. In other words, corporates fail to create an unfair advantage from leveraging these assets. As the Best Practice framework Lean Scaleup shows, there are several reasons why this is so. One of these reasons will be the focus topic of this talk: Corporates struggle in establishing a productive collaboration between Core and Innovation (the corporate startup / scaleup). The talk will provide an analysis of the problem and provide solution ideas from two angles. Frank Mattes, expert in corporate business-building, advisor to corporate innovators and serial author on corporate business-building, will share his learnings in working together with 20+ companies and 2 business schools on this issue. Sören Lauinger, formerly head of B. Braun’s business model lab “werk 39” and now VP in a corporate role for “Innovation and Interfaces” will share examples and insights about how to align scaleups with corporate sales and other corporate functions.

Frank Mattes is an expert in corporate business-building, advisor to Corporate Innovation and Corporate Venturing, and author of two books on taking corporate innovation ideas to scale. In the last four years, Frank focused on the corporate business-building problem: why do large companies struggle dramatically in building new businesses from innovation – and how can they improve? Together with 20+ industry leaders from many sectors, Frank co-created the Lean Scaleup™ framework. This framework comprises Best Practices in how to validate/scale corporate innovation initiatives and create new sizable, profitable businesses The Lean Scaleup is the latest addition to the corporate entrepreneurship toolbox. It takes the Lean Startup into the corporate context, extends it to an end-to end journey from idea to scale and comprises the Best Practices from some of the world’s finest companies. To help corporate innovation practitioners improve in business-building, Frank founded the consulting agency Lean Scaleup and published the book with the same name in May 2021. The book was co-written with two dozens of corporate practitioners and two leading business schools, UC Berkeley and the London Business School. Please find more on the book and the Lean Scaleup framework at www.leanscaleup.com/book Before Lean Scaleup, Frank founded innovation-3, a consulting agency specialized in non-incremental innovation), was with the Boston Consulting Group and Member of the Board of a B2B scaleup. Frank holds two M.Sc. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles and Ulm University (Germany). Sören and his team overlook the creation of digital customer solutions within a newly created business unit which combines consulting, software and products to help hospitals to have a better running OR supply. He has a long background on building solutions “beyond the product”, in short: Innovation for Services, Solutions, Business Models and not least the consultative sales approach. Sören combined these activities under the roof of the innovation lab “werk_39”. Sören got his MBA degree in Medical Devices and Healthcare Management. Sören works out of Tuttlingen, Germany.

At Airbus, they are conscious that the corporate DNA is heavily rooted in engineering rigour, where imperfection and uncertainty lead to catastrophe.Product failure is unacceptable and inexcusable in their industry. Their products, by their very nature, are complex, often require colossal investment, have a lifecycle spanning decades and operate in a heavily regulated industry. As an organization, they are risk-averse. Their own complexity slows them down. Given this context, how is Christian leading Airbus’ efforts to building new ventures from the ground up? What is working (so far), what are lessons learned – and will this eventually succeed?

Christian Lindener is Head of Airbus BizLab, an aerospace accelerator. Prior to joining Airbus, Lindener worked as Managing Director for Wayra Germany, a technology innovation hub. In this role, he oversaw the strategic direction of the organisation, as well as, the selection of startups and young technology corporations for integration into the Telefonicà investment portfolio. As an independent tech consultant, he has created and advised more than 20 incubator and accelerator programs. As Director of TechFounders, a high-tech hardware accelerator based in Munich, he was responsible for the development of more than 50 high-tech startups. Lindener has co-founded several companies, one of which–a virtual reality startup—was sold to booking.com in 2014. Most recently, he co-launched D3 Technologies AG, an open digital operations platform for the urban air mobility market. Christian was born in Brazil–and grew up in Mexico. He studied international business administration and economics at the Leopold-Franzens-University in Innsbruck, the University of New Orleans and the University of Barcelona.

In this session, we will discuss why scaling is so tough, especially beyond the core. We will look at the business building process, present a current case Innoleaps are working on for a large multinational client and finally, next to this, we will explore four fundamental pillars that will help increase scaling success.

Misha de Sterke, is a creative entrepreneur and venture builder for Fortune 100 companies. Two times awarded author and senior partner at Innoleaps. Misha’s focus lies on helping clients protect, grow or transform their business. Combining a strategic perspective with a pragmatic and effective style of implementation where Strategy = Execution.

With both venture building and sustainability high on the corporate agenda, many wonder how to marry those topics. Can corporates build ventures in the sustainability space? And what are the tools and methods that can help them to build sustainability ventures? Finally, what should governance work like? MING Labs is a seasoned corporate venture builder with a strong footprint in the Digital Sustainability Transformation. In this session, Sebastian will share his insights from building multiple sustainability ventures – with and without corporates – to highlight lessons learned and provide tools and tips.

Sebastian Mueller is the Chief Operating Officer and Co-Founder of MING Labs. He is also a business leader, advisor and investor in early-stage startups, as well as an author and speaker on topics around corporate innovation, digital transformation, future of work and the societal impact of technology. He has worked with digital innovation and transformation units from some of the most reputable brands globally.

Many companies that are exploring new ways to drive long term profitability and relevance through corporate venture building do quite well in the early phases of the process, creating ideas, validating them, developing a product/offering. But there is a clear pattern that many struggle when they come to the point where they have ventures that should accelerate their growth, and scale. There are a few common reasons for this, that have to do with mechanisms within the corporation, and how the innovation/venture building process is set up. In this session Sigrid will go through common reasons for why corporate ventures fail to scale, and give some key insights into how the corporation can work to create the right conditions for enabling their ventures to scale successfully.

With a core in business design, Sigrid has dedicated her career to creating new digital products and ventures, across industries and markets. As Venture Lead at the Stockholm based corporate venture builder Desifer she helps established companies utilise their assets to create new digital ventures, to ensure sustainable growth and long term relevance.