Innovation management using the venture client model (inno.venture)

Collaboration between start-ups and companies is becoming increasingly important. Start-ups develop pioneering technologies and take an agile and flexible approach. The aim for established companies is to implement innovations faster and more effectively through cooperation and thus be successful in competition. Previously used methods such as corporate venture capital and accelerators are often too bureaucratic and slow and unsuitable for integrating start-up technologies into the products, processes or business models of established companies. This is where the venture client model comes in. Established companies become early customers of start-ups (venture clients) and test their technology as part of pilot projects. The integration of the model into organizations and innovation strategies presents companies with a number of challenges that are to be solved in the ‘Innoventure’ research project.

The overall aim of the project is to develop a framework for establishing the venture client model in innovation clusters and companies. To this end, the project is structured as follows:

The first project objective is to develop a cooperation process for structuring bilateral cooperation between companies and start-ups on the one hand and cooperation in a consortium of several companies on the other (e.g. an innovation cluster such as it’s OWL).

The second project objective is to support companies in applying and scaling the venture client model. To this end, building blocks for the structural and process organization are being developed and guidelines for the transformation of innovation management in companies are being drawn up.

The third project objective is to test and validate the results obtained. By implementing the model in real projects, the results are to be optimized iteratively.

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