Innovation Growth Lab
Welcome to the world of Growth Labs, where organizations harness the power of collaboration, crowd intelligence, experimentation and design to drive innovations forward.
What is a growth Lab and why should you have one?
Let us explain in more detail what we mean with a Growth Lab. In simple terms, a growth lab is:
- A specific delivery model to realize your innovation initiatives.
- An inspirational physical (or virtual) place in your organization, in which to collaborate, ideate, and get your hands dirty.
- A place to explore, discover, validate, and build innovation opportunities for specific business needs and compelling use cases.
- An opportunity to experiment with internal innovation teams and carefully selected external partners.
- A strategic innovation hotbed that drives strategic growth initiatives, from cost reduction, new product development to enhancing user experience and business model transformation
- A formal collaboration space governed by an explicit contract between the innovation team and the business and guided by a supportive Growth Board
- A long-term, mandated commitment to innovation which safeguards sustainability and sufficiency of resources, including skilled staffing, adequate budget, and cutting-edge tools.
A Growth Lab is instrumental in the ideation and validation stages of your innovation process. It is a safe haven for innovators and allows innovations to be validated outside of the constraints of the business.
We already explained having a Growth Lab fast tracks your business’ growth. Here are the key considerations around creating a Growth Lab for your organization.
- Create a dedicated and secure space for experimentation, free from the constraints of corporate rules, regulations, controls, and procedures.
- Foster a distinct working environment that sets the Growth Lab apart from the rest of the organization, encouraging fresh perspectives and innovative thinking.
- Cultivate a unique culture and mindset within the Growth Lab, promoting creativity, risk-taking, and a pioneering spirit
- Embrace a multidisciplinary approach by assembling specialized teams within the Growth Lab, harnessing diverse expertise and perspectives for collaborative problem-solving.
- Empower employees to develop their skills as corporate innovators, providing opportunities for growth and learning within the dynamic environment of the Growth Lab
- Establish a powerful catalyst for driving change throughout your organization, utilizing the Growth Lab as a lever to introduce and implement transformative initiatives.
The Growth Lab is backed by the comprehensive innovation suite of our partner, Qmarkets.
Managing your innovation process as a core business process requires solid support with state-of-the-art systems. Qmarkets’ end-to-end innovation software fits the bill.
The Growth Lab Playbook
Create purpose-built environments which serve as catalysts for groundbreaking ideas.
KLM Technology Innovation
Setting up a new corporate technology innovation venturing organization called BlueLabs
The RevelX Corporate Venturing Program
Start small, start with the Corporate Venturing Readiness Assessment
Whether you are new to the topic of corporate venturing or have years of experience, a good place to start is to participate with the free RevelX Corporate Venturing Assessment (CVRA).
The Corporate Venturing Readiness Assessment allows you to measure how to stack up against the 25 best practices in corporate venturing.
Compare your organization with the high performers in our benchmark
Understand which areas can drive venturing performance and where to improve
Receive a personal report including customized recommendations, during a (virtual) 30 minutes meeting with one of our professionals.
Start with the Corporate Venturing Readiness Assessment
Get out of the building to become more successful in innovative growth. Start the assessment and gain valuable insights in how to increase your overall innovation power.
RevelX Venturing Discovery Workshop
A great way to follow up your Corporate Venturing Readiness Assessment is to engage in a customized 1- or 2-day Venturing Discovery workshop with your team.
In this workshop we pay attention to the why and what of corporate venturing, your business strategy, and innovation mix to achieve your long-term development goals.
We also address the how? Your current innovation practice and in particular your venturing capabilities. To measure your overall innovation performance, we make use of our proven Innovation Readiness Benchmark.
This workshop is especially designed for organizations who are new of relatively new to Corporate Venturing.
After the Venturing Discovery Workshop, you will get:
- Clear insights in specific improvement areas and venture opportunities
- Prioritization where to start with the highest pay off
- Action plan for change
The RevelX Search Process Modules
In the search process, the crux is to get ahead of everybody else in spotting valuable trends, startups and scaleups. Getting access to these is no easy task. Finding breakthrough technologies in the labs of research centres and universities is even more difficult.
Proper search implies research of everything out there. There are many sources and no single source covers all. In order to win you must be very proactive
RevelX offers two modules to improve your search process:
Advanced Scouting
Advanced scouring is aimed at widening the scope of your search process and improving the qualifying and vetting of potential partners.
- The starting point of the scouting process is your innovation strategy. For which specific use cases and or strategic challenges do you want to engage in corporate venturing?
- The next step is to scout a wide array of sources for potential corporate venturing opportunities or solutions
- The longlist will be narrowed down through a validation (qualifying and vetting) process into a shortlist of potentials.
- The potential candidates will be matched with the business and it’s specific challenges and requirements. First engagements are organized, with letters of intent (LOIs) as a result when the match is positive.
Our Advanced Scouting module has been closely developed with our technology partners.
Innovation Challenges
Where our Advanced Scouting module sets you up for proactive search, our Innovation Challenges module focusses on organizing campaigns and open innovation challenges around one or more specific innovation problems and strategic opportunities.
This module comes as a highly automated process that we organize in close cooperation with our innovation technology partner Qmarkets. Qmarkets is one of the top tier end-to-end software providers in the field of innovation and Open Innovation.
The RevelX Venturing Management Module
To become more successful in corporate venturing you must organize and manage for success!
This implies a well-structured corporate venturing management process. The basis for this process can be found in this Playbook, based on the best practices in the field.
It also calls for a standardized workflow, fitting with the organization’s systems and being agile enough to respond quickly to arising opportunities.
Based on your maturity level, this module will be broken down into the following deliverables:
Design
When your innovation strategy is clear, and you know what you want to achieve it is time to design the way to create success! In a design sprint workshop, we will jointly construct a continuous and efficient process for corporate venturing, including appropriate levels of automation.
Align
The corporate venturing process must be aligned with the business. Not as a stand-alone and one-off activity. It should be integrated with the company’s strategy and internal innovation processes, as one continuous process. Communication, and a proper governance structure (like a Growth Board) are key activities.
Implement
We configure the corporate venturing process and tooling to function within your organization. This means configuring the (automated) venturing platform and turning on the external sources for scouting and matching within your organization. We incorporate current corporate venturing workflows in the new process.
Run
In the run-phase RevelX performs three key activities:
- Optimize: RevelX optimizes the workflow during a specific period after completion
- Monitor: RevelX monitors (at a distance) and resolve issues and improve when necessary
- Outsource: RevelX can take over the corporate venturing workflow process, Corporate Venturing as a Service, based on (pre)defined KPIs and SLAs.
The RevelX Alliance Performance Module
It takes two to tango. Good Alliance management starts with alignment of individual (strategic) goals of the partners and congruence of business ethics, integrity, and mutual respect. The right fit.
Other essential ingredients are good communication, proper resources, the right systems and way of working. Partnership also needs corporate’s ownership at the right level and place, and alignment with the organization.
RevelX starts this module with our PULSE, our assessment that measures the heartbeat of your existing partnerships.
After the assessment, we will further develop this module together with the customer according to the maturity leven and needs of the organization.
Download the RevelX Corporate Venturing Playbook
In this RevelX Innovation playbook we introduce the concept of Corporate Venturing and how to be successful at it.