Matt Chinworth
Venture studios are emerging as a compelling — if resource-intensive — way for organizations to maximize value creation through innovation. Pioneered by organizations such as Google, the studio model offers a structured and systematic approach to venture creation inside an organization. But before adopting it, leaders must ask: Is a studio the right fit for our context, and what resources and capabilities must we deploy to make it work?
Whether established as stand-alone entities, embedded within investment funds, or housed inside large corporations, universities, or government organizations, venture studios systematically assemble ideas, people, and resources to create multiple new ventures.1 Their teams first identify and shape promising opportunity spaces, and then they recruit entrepreneurs into those spaces and cofound ventures with shared equity. Subsequently, they advance multiple ventures in parallel through structured experimentation, apply rigorous down-selection (narrowing the field of choices), and provide ongoing operational support until ventures are either terminated, chosen to remain within the organization, or spun out as independent companies. According to our analysis and industry reports, the number of independent and in-house venture studios doubled from 2018 to 2023, to number 870.2
While the studio model is popular, it is not without its challenges. The high equity stakes and operational control that venture studios often maintain can deter competent founders from joining the new ventures and external investors from allocating funds in follow-on rounds. In addition, supporting multiple ventures simultaneously with substantial investment before any returns materialize creates capital requirements that may exceed available resources. Without careful and rigorous down-selection, the pipeline becomes diluted, weakening the funnel logic that is central to effective venture development and scaling.
Internal venture studios within large organizations face additional challenges. Some have had visible success, such as Google X, with its development of Waymo (valued at over $100 billion); and SC Ventures, with Mox, Hong Kong’s fastest-growing digital bank. But corporate venture studios are subject to their parent organizations’ priorities, governance structures, and corporate bureaucratic layers, such as legal, risk, and compliance functions, making them vulnerable to shifts that may reduce their funding or shut them down altogether. For instance, Tenney 110 (the studio of American Family Insurance) closed in 2023 due to governance barriers, despite having produced viable ventures, while both the BP venture studio Launchpad and General Mills’s G-Works innovation studio were terminated following strategic changes in direction.
Given corporations’ notable successes in venture building on the one hand and significant challenges on the other, leaders are right to ask whether, and under what conditions, building a venture studio is the right approach to boosting innovation in their organization.
To answer these questions, we drew on five years of research in the field, including over 100 conversations with leaders from 65 internal and independent venture studios spanning continents and sectors. The result is a framework to assess whether an organization should establish a venture studio, and the finding that three core resources are required for effective corporate venture building. We suggest that for internal venture building to provide a sustainable competitive advantage, at least one of the three resources must originate internally. We will also outline advice on governance, leadership, and portfolio management.
Why Corporations Choose to Build Venture Studios
Corporations have typically resorted to corporate venture capital (CVC) or accelerators as an alternative to the challenging task of building new ventures in-house. CVC takes minority stakes in startups, with limited involvement, while accelerators provide time-bound support to startup cohorts.3 Both models position the corporation as a somewhat hands-off facilitator of a preexisting startup with predetermined priorities.
In contrast, venture studios position the corporation as cofounder from their inception and offer potentially bigger payoffs than CVC or accelerators by originating and executing ideas in line with strategic priorities while retaining ownership and decision rights. This enables them to take a more targeted approach by accessing existing corporate infrastructure, supply chains, customer bases, and reputations. Specifically, internal venture studios allow organizations to tap strategically relevant pools of ideas, resources, and talent that have been cultivated over time — an approach taken by Nokia Bell Labs, and by Philips’s and ASML’s HighTechXL, among others.
There are three main motivations for companies to establish a venture studio.
The first is to develop strategically sensitive opportunities that fall outside the mandate or capacity of their current business units and that cannot be easily sourced through external channels. Google Brain exemplifies this: Started within Google X in 2011, it later became integral to AI across Google’s products. This example illustrates a broader pattern: Venture studios within large organizations are often created to pursue focused yet highly uncertain opportunities that may challenge — or even cannibalize — existing business lines before external competitors do. That is something core units are rarely structured or incentivized to do.
Second, in-house venture studios are established to exploit proprietary resources — talent, intellectual property (IP), or insights — or governance structures that allow a corporation to operate in highly regulated environments. Many of the new venture ideas at Standard Chartered’s SC Ventures required coordinated access to regulatory approvals, as well as data and compliance governance structures. Zodia Custody, built by SC Ventures in 2020, securely stores cryptocurrencies for large financial institutions. It was able to operate in a highly regulated environment at an entrepreneurial pace by capitalizing on Standard Chartered’s banking licenses, compliance infrastructure, and in-house venture studio processes.
Finally, venture-building initiatives create hybrid structures that enable both corporate value capture and entrepreneurial exploration. They provide a mechanism for combining external talent with internal resources and experimenting with new business models at arm’s length, offering spaces for entrepreneurial freedom and hypothesis testing. Over time, these efforts generate accumulated learning, broaden the organization’s capability set, and strengthen its entrepreneurial culture — outcomes that meaningfully improve long-term adaptability and organizational renewal.
Is a Venture Studio Right for Your Organization?
Building a venture studio is a long-term, resource-intensive commitment. The decision requires a structured assessment of strategic fit, organizational capabilities, governance readiness, and leadership alignment. The following four conditions determine whether a venture studio is appropriate.
Condition 1: Does your organization possess any of the three core inputs — talent, IP, and insights — that make venture building possible? For an in-house venture studio to be effective, at least one of three critical resources — specialized talent, an extensive patent portfolio, or unique market insights — must be robust, unique, and, ideally, in oversupply. These resources also must be identifiable, measurable, and demonstrably differentiated rather than based on a general sense of potential.
Unmet potential can be identified systematically in three ways:
- Internal capability assessments, such as identifying teams with excess technical capacity, specialized knowledge, or repeatable, excess know-how that could underpin new venture opportunities.
- IP landscaping and portfolio audits that reveal underutilized technologies with strong novelty in comparison to the market, along with defensibility or cross-domain applicability. A small subset of patents that seem attractive can make a strong base for a venture studio.
- Data-driven opportunity identification, using proprietary data sets, usage patterns, or operational signals that are unavailable to external competitors. Similarly, market analyses, including structured problem-discovery interviews, unmet-need mapping, and customer-journey diagnostics, can be performed. When these analyses reveal a surplus of differentiated assets — for example, patents not currently commercialized, repeated customer pain points unaddressed by existing products, or technical teams with transferable entrepreneurial competencies — venture building becomes a rational mechanism for converting these dormant resources into new venture pathways.
If your organization cannot identify at least one of the critical resources internally, a venture studio is unlikely to succeed. In such cases, the organization should focus on more traditional innovation approaches — such as corporate accelerators, incubators, or corporate venture capital — until these foundational capabilities are built. If, however, your organization does possess one of these critical resources, the next question is how to best leverage it.
Let’s take a look at how some organizations have done it.
Harnessing internal talent: Health technology company Philips and semiconductor company ASML created the joint venture studio HighTechXL to develop deep-tech ventures by capitalizing on their employees’ technical, market, and managerial expertise. By exempting exceptional employees from their regular duties, Philips enabled them to become cofounders of startups in the health care sector. The studio achieved its first major exit in January 2025, when German sensor company Sick acquired Accerion — a Dutch deep-tech startup that develops positioning systems for autonomous mobile robots using optical floor-scanning technology. As of this writing, HighTechXL startups have raised over 170 million euros (more than $200 million) since 2015.4
By providing access to existing IP, Philips allowed employees to integrate their technical expertise into new entrepreneurial opportunities. ASML also allocated employee time for venture exploration. Whereas entrepreneurial employees might previously have left the company to found startups, this approach has enabled them to build independent ventures that benefited both ASML and the broader innovation ecosystem. A noteworthy venture-building example out of HighTechXL is Carbyon, a carbon capture technology company that has raised 15.3 million euros ($18.83 million) in Series A funding.5
Likewise, Google X — a venture studio, by our definition — recognized the wealth of talent at Google and the strategic imperative to explore bold new ideas beyond the company’s core mission. Given the high-risk nature of projects extending beyond Google’s core strategic focus, it operates as a separate division under the Alphabet umbrella. By systematizing experimentation in a series of parallel ventures, Google X created Waymo, Verily, and Wing. Drawing on employees’ technical skills and a deep understanding of various markets, Google X has provided a space for corporate talent to actively engage in new ventures, either as advisers or cofounders.
Talent-led in-house venture studios allow organizations to retain creative, entrepreneurial individuals. While some ventures may ultimately spin off from the studio once they have reached maturity — taking some staff members with them — the new high-potential ventures generate long-term insights and economic opportunity for the corporation.
Capitalizing on internal IP: Organizations with large IP portfolios are also motivated to build venture studios. MIT’s Proto Ventures program exemplifies this, bringing in dedicated, external entrepreneurs with both academic experience and startup expertise to assemble viable new ventures based on university research and IP. While ventures built on university research have traditionally relied on students and faculty members aligning serendipitously, entrepreneurs at Proto Ventures can work to efficiently assemble people, IP, and resources around a portfolio of ventures. The studio has, to date, systematically explored opportunities in health/AI, nuclear fusion, and geothermal technologies, gradually bringing other sources of talent from across the institute (including MBA fellows and additional faculty members) and a range of IP. While still in its early stages, Proto Ventures’ Vertical Semiconductor, a portfolio company that provides energy-efficient semiconductor power conversion for data centers, raised $11 million in funding last October.6
Universities are not alone in considering an IP-based venture studio approach. Under the umbrella of a venture studio, the U.S. National Security Innovation Network matched technologies from the Department of Defense (DOD) with entrepreneurial teams recruited through an open application process. These external entrepreneurs collaborated with inventors and subject matter experts from the DOD’s research ecosystem, and end users to assess the market viability of cutting-edge technologies. The goal was for these teams to form new companies and develop solutions that would benefit both the DOD and the private sector.
Nokia Bell Labs was created to transform the scientific advancements of private-sector telecommunications company Nokia into commercial ventures that could be integrated into other business units or spun out as independent companies. One notable spinout, Accelsius, was founded in 2022 to commercialize Bell Labs’ two-phase direct-to-chip liquid-cooling technology. Since then, it has raised $24 million in Series A funding, progressed from founding to revenue in under three years, and reported up to 50% reductions in cooling energy use and a tenfold increase in rack power density for AI data centers. In early 2026, it closed a $65 million Series B funding round led by Johnson Controls.7
Acting on market insights: Some organizations also have market insights into evolving customer needs that can be used in a corporate venture studio. Chalhoub, the Middle East’s largest retailer, has drawn on insights from more than 400 clients to build ventures aligned with its strategic priorities. Its Greenhouse Startup Studio has attracted talent while enabling employees and external founders to develop ideas that complement corporate R&D in areas like the future of work, the circular economy, and retail digitization. Founders have had access to Chalhoub’s data, infrastructure, and client prototyping opportunities. Ventures have been cobuilt, tested in existing channels, and iterated, leading to either spin-offs or reintegration. Several of the studio’s ventures have gained early traction in the Middle East and North Africa market. Wear That (Series A), for example, is scaling an AI-powered personal-styling platform across the region while the Abaya Lab (seed stage) is redefining modest fashion through a digital, made-to-order tailoring model.
In financial services, SC Ventures identified a trend in fintech, blockchain, and platform models. The studio was set up as an entity independent of Standard Chartered, with its own governance structure. This deliberate separation allowed the bank to identify novel opportunities and transform concepts into scalable business models that built on top of its existing regulatory and banking knowledge. Standard Chartered portfolio company Zodia Custody has raised over $36 million and expanded into key markets, such as Singapore and Japan, positioning it as a leading institutional crypto-custody provider.8 Another major success is Solv, a digital commerce platform SC Ventures created that was acquired by B2B food and grocery marketplace Jumbotail in 2025 in a deal that yielded Standard Chartered approximately $200 million.9
Condition 2: Can your organization maximize internal and external resources? In addition to having one or more of the three core resources, all studios in our sample used the corporation’s scale advantages, including established distribution channels, existing customer relationships, and operational infrastructure. Together, these assets allowed new ventures to scale more rapidly than comparable independent startups. Your organization’s venture studio may be grounded in a surfeit of talent, IP, or insights, but it is rare to have all three core resources needed to build ventures internally. And while possessing one of these three resources is necessary, it is not sufficient. The company must be able to acquire the other two from external sources. As a result, the most effective internal studios craft hybrid structures that bring in external resources to amplify internal assets.
Once an organization has identified its primary resource advantage, the next step is to assess whether it also has a meaningful understanding of unmet market needs. If an organization does not have such insights, it may need to bring in external expertise and talent — such as an entrepreneur in residence (EIR) or a venture builder — to conduct market discovery and problem mapping before advancing to the next step. Nokia Bell Labs did exactly that: It sought external collaborations with researchers, universities, and strategic partners to broaden its capabilities beyond its core portfolio, and it recruited EIRs who were domain experts to enhance internal technologies’ commercial viability and market application.
Another way to bring in market insights is by partnering with one’s own customers. Standard Chartered partnered with client companies to create problem statements while also tapping into internal crowdsourcing to develop innovative solutions for complex problems. The bank’s own employees then proposed ideas, formed teams, and experimented. Together with their client companies, they refined their ideas to create — and, at a later stage, invest in — their own companies.
Lastly, organizations that have innovative talent but are limited by small R&D departments can also incorporate external IP by building connections with research institutions to scout for technologies that can be commercialized within the internal venture studio. For example, by establishing strong relationships with CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) and the European Space Agency, HighTechXL combined external IP with proprietary technologies and talent pool. The hybrid model allowed it to apply the existing expertise of senior Philips and ASML staff members, who in turn benefited from being exposed to external technologies.
Condition 3: Does your organization possess the required governance processes for internal venture-building efforts? Creating hybrid structures that allow internal resources to be matched with external assets — such as co-investors, founders, or technical partners — in a strategic and agile way requires adequate governance structures. If governance mechanisms are weak or absent, the immediate priority should be to build those structures before attempting venture building. Those structures do not need to be arduous or overly bureaucratic; rather, they should allow for rapid down-selection and the allocation of more resources to the most promising ideas.
In many corporations, ideas are either killed prematurely or allowed to live for too long despite having limited impact. Venture studios counteract both pathologies by widening the idea funnel and using dedicated, independent decision-making systems that allow promising but uncertain ideas to survive early scrutiny. By temporarily decoupling idea evaluation from legacy business constraints, studios ensure that potentially disruptive concepts are not prematurely dismissed due to perceived risk or misalignment with existing KPIs.
Many venture studios we studied enable this by operating as separate entities with their own governance structures. Studio teams rely on data-driven stage-gate frameworks — adapted to the organizational and regulatory environment — to make systematic continuation or termination decisions. These frameworks emphasize evidence generation rather than managerial opinion: Ventures must demonstrate product-market fit, achieve regulatory milestones within defined timelines (typically, six to 18 months), or face project termination under preset criteria. Evaluating ventures in this manner against internal and market benchmarks helps prevent continued investment and engagement with underperforming projects.
In addition, many studios intentionally normalize and even celebrate early idea termination. Google X encourages teams to kill ideas as soon as fatal flaws emerge, rewarding them through peer recognition, managerial approval, and even bonus incentives. By making termination a respected milestone, the practice was designed to accelerate learning, preserve human and monetary resources, and ensure that only viable projects advance.10
Given this dynamic environment, organizations should treat new studios as entrepreneurial test beds for exploring disruptive technologies or ideas rather than “startup factories.” Hence, the measurement and definition of success should be multilayered, with your venture-building unit measuring portfolio, strategic, and financial metrics. Portfolio metrics may include the number of ventures launched per year; survival (or kill/failure) rates at 18, 36, and 60 months; time to key milestones; customer acquisition; and external validation through funding or partnerships (such as pilot adoption). Strategic metrics can measure the integration of existing or new IP and technology into the core business, access to new customers, market insight generation, and partnerships. Financial metrics typically focus on the internal rate of return or MOIC (multiple on invested capital) at the portfolio level over a five-to-10-year horizon rather than on individual venture P&Ls.
Where the internal capability to design such systems is limited, organizations sometimes partner with professional venture-building partners, such as FedTech or Alloy Partners (formerly High Alpha Innovation), that align with the corporation’s strategic goals and work to support and build new ventures within a custom-built venture studio.
Only if the governance system is robust and fit for purpose can the organization proceed to consider leadership commitment.
Condition 4: Does your organization possess a commitment of time and money from leadership? Leaders typically establish venture studios as semiautonomous units with dedicated governance structures. Often, a venture board is formed that includes senior corporate stakeholders who protect the nascent venture-building initiative and one or two external advisers to provide objective evaluation. Starting with a dedicated venture builder or EIR who can mobilize and integrate resources enables parallel venture building without large financial outlays. Applying existing resources efficiently by starting with smaller, incremental investments gives organizations the agility to decide whether to move forward with a venture studio. In addition, studios rely on highly connected middle managers who can lead them and empower front-line entrepreneurial leaders by linking them to the most essential internal resources.
The most effective studios secure multiyear, independent capital, often through a separate budget line or an internal VC-style fund. Some operate funds with other corporations solely dedicated to venture building (such as Philips’s and ASML’s HighTechXL), while others (such as Nokia) have separate VC arms where internal concepts from the studio compete for funding alongside externally sourced ideas. Establishing a separate legal and financial vehicle shields ventures from the limitations of annual corporate budgeting and protects them from short-term performance pressures.
Leaders must appreciate that seeing results from venture building can take five to 10 years, depending on the industry, and they must be willing to at least partially fund the ongoing development of the most promising ventures so that internal gains can be secured and strategic goals met. Funding is typically staged, with seed capital initially coming from the studio itself, followed by funding from corporate venture arms or external syndication once key milestones have been met.
Without a realistic time horizon and leadership stability, the studio will be underfunded, strategically inconsistent, or vulnerable to shifts in corporate priorities. If, however, leadership is supportive and aligned and, importantly, can commit to a decade of steady investment, then a studio can reasonably be built to operate effectively, generate high-quality venture opportunities, and create a sustainable pipeline of new businesses aligned with long-term corporate goals.
Is establishing a venture studio the right move for your organization? The answer lies in whether your organization has a deep vein of highly specialized and externally attractive resources on at least one dimension — talent, market insights, or IP. When combined with committed leadership and an organizational willingness to cede governance control to a venture-building group, and to build internal coordination to capitalize on the emerging (proto-) ventures, a studio can serve as an important dimension of your innovation strategy.