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Venturing has become a familiar word in corporate strategy. Exploring new opportunities, building new businesses, stay relevant as markets shift. And still, many venturing efforts feel harder than they should.
This article explores why many corporate venturing efforts stall despite strong intent and investment. It breaks down the most common pain points and shows how a clear operating model can turn venturing from a recurring frustration into a reliable growth capability.
The root cause is rarely a lack of ideas or ambition. More often, venturing fails because the organisation never agreed on a clear way of doing it.
The classic symptoms (and what is really happening)
- Ad-hoc venturing, no system
Venturing starts because an opportunity appears, a new leader pushes a topic, or because it is “in”. Without a shared system, each initiative becomes a one-off. Every project has to justify itself from scratch.
- Lacking commitment
Some milestones are reached, then the struggles begin. When real hurdles or investment needs show up, support becomes shaky. Teams lose time fighting for basic resources instead of building.
- Too much commitment (sunk cost trap)
Projects keep running long after they should have been stopped. Budgets continue because stopping feels uncomfortable, not because the evidence supports continuation.
- Using core processes for venture uncertainty
Ventures deal with unknown unknowns, not just calculable risk. Applying core innovation processes often leads to slow validation, uncomfortable decision cycles, and endless analysis loops.
- Budget follows noise, not evidence
The loudest project gets the budget. The best learning does not always win. Politics replaces portfolio logic.
If you recognise a few of these, the key insight is simple: you cannot solve this only inside individual projects. The underlying system needs a reset.
How committed builders outperform occasional ones
When venturing works, it usually works because the organisation treats it as a serious capability, not a side project. Committed new business builders outperform occasional or un-systematic ones in a few telling ways:
- They build 3+ new businesses per year, around 1.9x more than their peers.
- They are 4.4x more likely to have a significant share (over 20%) of revenue coming from new business.
- They show a 2.4x higher venture success rate, meeting or exceeding expectations, with a 74% success rate reported in the referenced benchmark.
- They do not stop at strategy documents. They put real means behind the ambition, for example by allocating substantial innovation budgets to adjacent and radical initiatives.
The pattern behind these numbers is not complicated. Repetition creates muscle. Portfolio thinking replaces hero projects. A deliberate setup acknowledges that new and core business work differently.
A more reliable way to make venturing work: the Venture Operating Model
The Venture Operating Model creates clarity across four areas: venturing strategy, structure, governance, and execution. The goal is to make venturing work as an operating system, not as isolated experiments.
In practical terms, the framework helps you:
- align venturing with corporate strategic goals (so commitment becomes real, not cosmetic),
- define a venturing strategy and prioritise the right approaches,
- set up a structure with the right autonomy,
- build a governance that enables fast, informed decisions,
- establish execution capability through clear skills and a strong team setup.
What changes when you fix the system
A clear operating model does not promise that every venture will succeed. That would not be credible. What it does change is how venturing feels and performs inside the organisation:
- teams know what “good” looks like at each stage,
- leadership gets involved at the right moments, without overload,
- budgets follow learning and evidence, not internal noise,
- stopping becomes a normal outcome, not a personal failure,
- venturing becomes a portfolio discipline, not a series of recurring battles.
Venturing is like a house plant: It needs the right environment to grow, light from above and fertile soil from below. It can still all falter, if the pot is out of shape.
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