How do you remove blockers in your internal venturing pipeline? OneLeap helped a global industrials giant save millions of dollars by dramatically increasing their speed to value. We did this by redesigning their digital innovation strategy, creating an internal VC structure, and coaching team leaders to have a more entrepreneurial mindset.

A recent report for the client had identified billions of dollars of opportunities attached to new digital technologies that would shape the industry, and a new internal venturing programme had been set up to capture, validate and rapidly execute on nearer term opportunities. However, after 18+ months of work, most of the dozen venture teams still languished in the research phase, while other teams had paired a technology with a genuine need, but at such a low level of ambition as to almost completely dilute the opportunity area's potential.

Why was this happening, and what could be done about it?

We brought in a team with three distinct skill sets:

1. Experience in diagnosing and unblocking corporate innovation systems

2. Builders of fast-growing entrepreneurial ventures

3. Coaches with expertise in finding leaner ways to test - and take the necessary “emotional risks” to do so

We uncovered that teams were pursuing two seemingly contradictory objectives: On the one hand, they were told to make sure that whatever they did with a technology area served clear business needs. On the other hand, they were told to explore frontier tech areas to avoid missing out on “black swan” opportunities.

The consequence of this dissonance was not only a confusion on what to optimize for, but a failure of accountability. When managers challenged lack of progress on creating a genuine need, teams could cite wanting to focus on ambitious black swans that may not connect to today’s needs. When they were challenged about insufficient ambition, teams pointed to the imperative of solving a business need.

The presence of the two contradictory objectives meant it was very difficult to say when an idea was ready to implement, and very difficult to say when an idea should be killed. Resultedly, teams continued to work on ventures to a point where they had built out enough technology that at the very least, they couldn’t be criticised for failing to meet the strict quality standards necessary for the organisation when shipped. This became the default success criterion, at the expense of ventures that actually captured those multi-billion-dollar opportunities.

When we presented our findings, management acknowledged that there were in fact two objectives, and that the dissonance was a problem.

We worked with management and venture team members to design a new innovation track that acknowledged a quota of technology-led explorations that did not have to immediately find a business need, and another quota of ideas that had to start with a clear business need, but did not need to have immediately identified a breakthrough technology. At a set point in the process, the two sides would be brought together.

The next challenge was to bring a far more entrepreneurial culture to the venturing activity itself. Successful, serial entrepreneurs from our team provided roving mentoring and coaching to help the teams move more rapidly through the newly defined process. A big part of this was making technically-oriented team members comfortable with early desirability testing. Rather than just designing a process and training teams on this process, we worked hand in hand to give them the confidence to apply it.

The third part of the intervention involved creating an internal accountability system to replicate some aspects of the venture capital approach. The process enabled us to focus on clear decision points, where managers who had been trained to be internal “VCs”, were themselves coached on how to really push on whether the project was aligned with an agreed objective, whether it was going as fast as it could, and whether the experiment was truly an experiment and not a roll out in disguise.

Three powerful results came out of this work:

1. Speed-to-value was dramatically increased

2. Millions of dollars saved

3. New entrepreneurial skills and increased capability build

What takeaways could you apply from this process to boost your digital innovation pipeline?

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