Doing more with less: Scaling Venture Building in uncertain times with (Gen)AI

In recent years, corporate venture building has emerged as a favoured approach for fostering digital innovation within companies. When done correctly, it provides structured processes, clear deliverables, and valuable data for informed decision-making, reducing the risk of venture failure.

Venture Building in 2024

The economic challenges of 2023 led many companies to scale back their venture building activities due to limited investment capacity. In 2024, the focus for venture building units shifts towards achieving more with fewer resources, emphasizing efficiency and scalability. The latest developments in GenAI offer many opportunities to achieve this, on one hand by opening completely new playing fields and on the other hand by improving internal processes & accelerating product development. To clarify, the main venture building stages we are operating with are:

Upon an own reflection, we at Körber Digital have identified ways of how GenAI can make our venture building better & faster across all stages.

Our Venture Building stages

Our way to success

Discovery & Ideation

Discovery & Ideation is the phase with the most obvious areas of application for GenAI. Through finetuned prompting, the models become increasingly powerful in their research capabilities, which allows a quick generation of comprehensive market insights that ultimately lay out the foundation for deep user centric problem discovery. Understanding user pains is a vital part of venture building and is often done via countless interviews with experts and customers. GenAI can enhance this process significantly. By distilling lengthy interviews into key takeaways, actionable insights can be synthesized On the contrary there are limitations to consider. By the nature of an LLM, the models are not (yet) able to generate radically disruptive concepts, and if not prompted correctly you will find yourself easily in a collection of Gartner’s trending words for your next bingo night.

Validation

In 2023, we focused primarily on developing solutions that are based around GenAI. In many instances this allowed us to take advantage of existing LLM frameworks such as Langchain to develop functioning prototypes far quicker than before. This accelerates not only the development of prototypes but also allows user testing and speeds up the generation of a proof-of-concept. In retrospect this streamlines the handover from Validation to MVP Build, hence is an important factor to validate product market fit and ultimately significantly reduces time-to-market.

Build & Growth

The objective of the (MVP) Build - and later Growth phase - remains as a much more detailed solution validation, its value, specific features and product-market-fit. Beyond this, we see the biggest potential for GenAI in building and scaling ventures with leaner organisations which can drastically improve capital efficiency of a venture and eventually allows us to drive several projects in parallel, before doubling down on the most promising opportunity.

lIn my little group chat with my tech CEO friends there’s this betting pool for the first year that there is a one-person billion dollar company.r
Sam Altman, CEO @OpenAI, quoted in an article on "Fortune".

Conclusion

In conclusion, embracing GenAI is essential for scaling up venture building activities, enhancing efficiency, and driving innovation in times of uncertainty and limited investment. By leveraging these technologies, companies can navigate challenges effectively and capitalize on emerging opportunities. Not every venture building approach is the same, as each unit has to define what works best for it.

Do you want to learn more about our Venture Building approach? Get in touch with the authors on LinkedIn and follow our LinkedIn profile!

Written by Alexander Schindler, Team Lead Venture Discovery & GenAI at Körber Digital

Written by Christian Nauhauser, Venture Architect at Körber Digital

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