How we co-create corporate startups

Creating and running startups as part of a corporate is hard. It’s because the whole organization of a corporate is heavily optimized on execution. And that is how it is supposed to be!

Startups however are searching. Searching for a business model that works and can only start executing when they’ve found that working model.

A startup can not run, before it can walk

To be successful in searching, the whole startup team needs to be able to search. From the product owner to the developer. You need people who are persistently flexibel in their thinking. People that can accept that everything you think is true, is only an assumption, until it is tested. To be able to keep doing that over a longer period of time, structure and a good framework is needed.

We usually work with two-week innovation sprints. We determine the most risky assumption and see how we can validate or invalidate that assumption with the least amount of resources in the least amount of time. We keep track of the innovation progress in specialized software tools. It’s like Trello for innovation. We can easily see what experiments a team is running and what they have learned in the past weeks. We can also determine where they are on their journey to product/market fit, based on our NEXT Progress canvas.