1. Frame the Challenge

Creating, building, and launching successful new ventures always begins with an aspirational challenge related to the customer pain you are trying to solve. This challenge should be broad enough to generate disruptive ideas, yet still be bounded by well-defined value propositions to real customers and stakeholders, that is, to the people who matter most.

2. Unleash Your Internal Talent

Organizations that wish to remain relevant and thrive in the digital economy need to unleash their Intrapreneurs and give them the time and space to focus and work full-time on new ventures. In identifying these individuals, the parent company needs to step away from its usual evaluation rules and metrics and look for those people whose intrapreneurial personalities may have limited their careers or labeled them as mavericks or troublemakers in the company. Further, the parent company should recognize that not all internal entrepreneurs are the same—their strengths and skills become crucial at different points during the Incubate and Accelerate phases—and should be leveraged at the appropriate phase.

3. Embrace Risk and Failure

Why, despite enjoying tremendous assets and an army of talented Intrapreneurs, do many large companies find it difficult to design and launch new ventures, especially new ventures that can disrupt existing markets and create important new ones? It’s simple: they don’t embrace risk and failure as part of their culture. Smart organizations are now redefining the way they assess their people. In those companies, taking the risk to innovate has become a badge of honor, rather than a blemish on one’s career.

4. Add Method to the Madness

Successful Venture Building requires three factors:

• A team that is passionate about its new venture idea and allowed to work full-time for at least twelve weeks can handle the pace and ambiguity inherent in entrepreneurship, and brings complementary talents (superpowers) to bear to realize that idea. If a multibillion-dollar, multinational company cannot free up four to six people to work on a new venture for twelve weeks full-time (and hold their old jobs in case there is no customer pain), that company isn’t serious about innovation.
• A portfolio of tools, frameworks, and methodologies to ensure the company has a repeatable and scalable process to enable New Venture Teams and the Mothership to work at the greatest speed and with the greatest predictability and efficiency. Only with a real methodology can a large company maximize each new venture’s probability of success and ensure it can build a pipeline and portfolio of new ventures (not just one). You need a portfolio of new ventures to drive meaningful, move-the-needle growth.
• The outside inspiration, experience, and mentoring needed to move smartly and minimize mistakes. The best Venture Factories provide their startup teams with a broad range of expertise—former entrepreneurs, VC investing experience, customer development professionals, UX or UI experts, go-to-market gurus, product developers, technology architects, marketers that love storytelling and design, and C-suite whisperers to help the Mothership embrace the from-to shifts needed to ensure their new ventures thrive.

5. Find Real Customer Pain

The best startups always exhibit radical customer empathy. They understand that surveys, focus groups, and hearsay are never substitutes for direct customer and stakeholder interviews. Surveys are statistically significant, but strategically irrelevant, because you have merely outsourced your visceral understanding and empathy for the customer to someone else, who will repackage it and sell it again. By outsourcing your understanding of customer pain, you miss valuable opportunities to learn the nuances of culture, philosophy, style, and personality that matter most to delivering a compelling customer experience. Whether it is B2B, B2C, or B2B2C—regardless how technical and complex what you are building is—to sell it requires a customer to buy it.

Needless to say, if your venture is going to conduct the interviews, that team must first want to talk to customers and, second, have the training, discipline, and dedication that exceeds the professionals. Keep in mind that most independent startups don’t have the budget to hire professionals—and they are definitely not more trained—they just have less baggage and more courage to just do it. Most of all, the team must be armed with the right questions about what it is trying to learn as it moves from pain point interviews to storyboards to prototypes—always listening for nuances every step of the way.

6. Master the Art of the Possible

All great startups can identify opportunities at the nexus of customer pain, the latest technologies, and emerging business models. And they have the imagination to move from there to the creation of a monetizable product or service that solves that pain. Having the vision to leap from pain to product to market is the magic moment for all great startups. Given the pace of change, large companies and their internal entrepreneurs must stay current on the trends and technologies they can access and adapt—even create and use—to delight their customers over and over again.

7. Work from the Future Backward

The best way to determine where you are going is to first decide where you want to be; the destination defines the direction. You need to establish your business and product offerings in the context of an opportunity framework—an executable vision—that is sufficiently significant to drive Mothership growth and a product road map to achieve that aspiration. With this bigger picture in mind, you now work back to the nearest future during which you can determine success. That is, you start with the minimum viable product: an MVP that can be tested quickly and inexpensively to learn, find traction, and ultimately establish product-market fit that can scale.

8. Prototype and Pilot: De-Risk, De-Risk, De-Risk

The Accelerate phase may be even more important than the Incubate phase. You want to incubate right to avoid the garbage-in, garbage-out problem, but Accelerate is when you drive to product-market fit and real revenue. Finding product-market fit requires an agile, yet rigorous approach to prototyping, piloting, and when necessary, pivoting. Regarding the last: don’t fall in love with your product or service; many of the world’s greatest companies were founded with very different product plans or business models than what led to their ultimate success. Be willing to turn on a dime in a new direction based on what you learn from customers. And whether it is technical, market, business model, or governance risk, your goal is to remove the greatest amount of risk with the least amount of capital.

9. Seize the Mothership Advantage to Reach Escape Velocity

Corporate startups have a unique advantage over typical VC-backed startups. The Global 1000 should avail themselves of those advantages, not least because they completely differentiate you from the disruptors dismissing you as dinosaurs. We are convinced that we are only in the early stages of seeing the current Disruption Economy evolve worldwide. For large companies to survive and thrive in this time of radical change, the name of the game is growth. To grow exponentially and cast aside the startup gnats buzzing you, the C-suite needs its own disruptor, its own chief growth officer. And this CGO needs a platform to drive growth—an internal Venture Factory with one job: to build a pipeline and portfolio of new customer-obsessed ventures, businesses, and products on a regular basis, in perpetuity, and across the globe.

The success of the CGO, the Venture Factory, and the ventures—and, therefore, the company—depends on their ability to leverage the Mothership’s established customers, channels, talent, technology, brand, supply chain, and capital to ensure its new ventures reach escape velocity into the marketplace far more quickly, and more robustly, than any independent startup against which the company competes. You must understand your core assets, capabilities, and competencies, and then you must remove the friction—the orthodoxies, antibodies, and inertia that kill good ideas or, at a minimum, starve them of oxygen. You need to get all that is great about your company in the hands of your internal entrepreneurs and New Venture Advocates. And you must create your own “Silicon Valley inside” to let your ventures thrive.

10. Do Good, Have Fun

There are two altruistic reasons to start a new venture and frankly why we founded Mach49. First, people are living longer and longer due to improved health care and technological advancements. That means they will be working longer and longer. As much as we celebrate startups, most people are employed by large companies, and they need purposeful, meaningful work for their ever-longer careers. Launching new ventures is one way to allow people in your organization to be entrepreneurial and creative, to feel alive, and yes, to have fun. We are blessed to be alive seven days a week, not just on the weekends. Life is meant to be lived, and the kind of work you feel good about can be extraordinarily fulfilling and rewarding. And, if you can excise the fear of failure from the lexicon of your workforce, then even ventures that don’t work still become valuable growth experiences that can improve the core business.

The second reason is to tackle the big, complex challenges we face on this planet. Climate change, education, disease, poverty, racism and bigotry, wildfires, hunger, water, disappearing species, and other challenges need our big companies to lean in—willing and able to disrupt them. Whatever your values, your duty is to build ventures that reflect the change you want to effect in the world.

Big companies have the ability within their power to address every one of these challenges. If we fall into the trap of finding the challenges too overwhelming, we risk doing nothing. If we think “that’s not our job,” that it’s government’s task to fix that problem, and that we personally are helpless, we are wrong, and deeply so. Each and every one of us has within us the capacity to drive profound change.

New ventures can be bold. They are a way to place the small bets we need to test solutions. They can move with speed and agility and, when managed right, are unbounded by the status quo. Even if your new idea isn’t destined to solve anything so grand, the way you go about building your venture can do good in and of itself. You, your Venture Factory, and your ventures can be role models in the way you hire, use resources, treat people, interact with partners, engage with the environment, accept differences, respect human rights, and play for the long term, not just the quarter. You can do well by doing good and you can have fun along the way, whether you are in the C-suite leading the way or the entrepreneur making it happen. Each and every one of us can drive positive, sustainable, meaningful growth for ourselves, our customers, our companies, and yes, absolutely, our planet.

The time to start is now. The moment is here. Build your Venture Factory. Do great things. Unleash the Unicorn within!