How an innovation-led mindset can boost success in corporate venture building

In a fast-changing and competitive world, companies must innovate to find new areas of growth.

Corporate leaders and business decision makers ─ or corporates ─ throughout Asia Pacific (APAC) estimate that 60 per cent of their growth for the next five years will come from new businesses, leading the majority to make new-business building a top-three priority*.

On average, these leaders are allocating one-third of their organic-growth capital to business-building, even launching multiple ventures at once to diversify risk and rapidly build the capabilities needed to maintain a steady venture pipeline.

An innovation-led culture is vital to the success of any corporate venture, and it begins with corporates demonstrating transparency, trust, and investment in employees’ career development. By doing so, corporates motivate employees to take risks, execute creative ideas, and make mistakes without fear of failure, thus paving the way for intrapreneurship.
 

Intrapreneurship: Realising great ideas, swiftly

In an ideal scenario, intrapreneurs are given a platform to cross-pollinate and brainstorm new, innovative ideas, and are supported in taking ownership of turning their business ideas into investible ventures that they can spearhead.

Such a culture presents a win-win situation: intrapreneurs boast a competitive edge over entrepreneurs as they can leverage their parent firm’s existing capital, networks, market insights/data, and domain expertise to realise their innovations and succeed in new growth areas. Throughout the process, they unlock new channels of growth and contribute to the maintenance of an innovation-led culture in the parent company.

Indeed, the pros of intrapreneurship are manifold. While only one in 500 startups succeed, the success rate for corporate-backed ventures is a far rosier one in eight. Data also suggests that corporates who embark on corporate venturing grow faster than their industry peers, respond better to market volatility due to their diversified portfolios, and enjoy higher venture success rates as they gain experience.

This mutually beneficial relationship may account for the number of corporate ventures in Singapore almost doubling between 2021 and 2022. So how does one cultivate an innovation-led culture which encourages intrapreneurship?