🟢 Venture clienting is the innovation flavor of the month. Does it work?

Short answer: Yes.

Longer answer: Venture clienting is only a tool among many others, and while it can be a fantastic way to boost an innovation program, it also has limits.

Venture clienting is having its moment (again)

Most corporations now seem to understand that startups being pushed into large organizations because a CEO met a founder at a trade fair, or because of a FOMO-driven hackathon, is now quite as efficient as expected (shocker).

Some "new" approaches seem to emerge with a much more practical mindset slowly. One of them is venture clienting. The principle is simple. Instead of random startups fighting their way through the corporate organization chart, business units pull in solutions for actual problems. In a sense, a Venture Client unit acts as a matchmaker, identifying the right startup for the need, running a PoC, and adopting it if it works.

I wrote "new" because I first learned this approach back in 2014 with Deutsche Bahn in Berlin. It was indeed lean, practical, and effective. But… there were two very big caveats that, at the time, the DB was managing quite well.