Unlocking Corporate Innovation Success:  The Venture Mindset

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In today’s fast-paced business world, standing still is not an option. Yet, for many corporates, innovation efforts often fall short of expectations. Great ideas fail to get off the ground due to internal silos, unclear processes, and risk-averse cultures.

At Tenity, we believe that innovation is achievable for every organization—with the right approach. This belief is grounded in a principle we call the Venture Mindset, a structured process that enables corporates to act as agilely and decisively as startups. In this blog post, we’ll explore how the Venture Mindset can transform your organization’s ability to innovate effectively.

Introducing the Venture Mindset

The good news? These challenges can be overcome. At Tenity, we work with corporates and startups globally to help them innovate more effectively. Through our Venture Mindset framework, we guide organizations in adopting a startup-like approach to innovation—one that prioritizes speed, iterative testing, and evidence-based decision-making.

The Venture Mindset consists of four key steps:

Discovery: Identify and analyze relevant business challenges.

Exploration: Ideate and identify potential solutions.

Experimentation: Rapidly test solutions in a controlled and iterative manner.

Evaluation: Plan and evaluate the most viable solutions to scale successfully, ensuring alignment with business objectives.

This isn’t just theory; it’s a process we use ourselves as a venture capital firm.

As a fintech/insurtech-focused early-stage VC and Accelerator, we always have an eye on the different business challenges that the industry is facing (Discovery).

Through our scouting funnel, we evaluate hundreds of startups each year that tackle challenges concerning the industry and invite the most promising ones to join our accelerator, investing small ticket sizes (Exploration).

During their time in our program, we constantly test the potential of the startups by exposing them to corporate partners for Proof-of-Concepts (PoCs) (Experimentation).

Ultimately, only after continued evaluation of the startups do we double down for a potential follow-up investment (Evaluation).

How to put the Venture Mindset into action?

We have developed a set of frameworks to support our corporate partners in evaluating innovation faster while decreasing risks and increasing success.

All templates can be downloaded at the bottom of the page!

SITUATION: Your customer onboarding process is very slow.

Stage 1 - Discovery‍

During this initial step, identify the user and the challenges they are facing. For example, in our scenario:

• The Pains & Gains Canvas (Discovery Phase) helps you understand who your audience is (e.g., team members who lose leads due to delays in the onboarding process).
• The Problem Definition Canvas (Discovery Phase) helps in defining the problem your user group is facing (e.g., delayed onboarding processes leading to missed opportunities and decreased conversion rates).

IMPORTANT: Always start with the user in mind. Don’t find a solution and then search for a user for it.

Stage 2 - Exploration

During the exploration stage, conducting a proper market scan of potential solutions is vital (e.g., digital KYC solutions using AI). Once you have done so, the Use Case Canvas (Exploration Phase) helps to pinpoint use cases for the identified solutions. Fill out a use case canvas for all interesting solutions.

Stage 3 - Experimentation

The secret to a good “Experimentation” stage is twofold: speed and small size!

Based on your use case canvas, spend some (!) time on the Experiment Canvas (Experimentation Phase) to plan your experiments. These experiments should be small in scale and narrow in scope.

IMPORTANT: Don’t fall victim to paralysis by over-analysis. Focus on speed instead.

Stage 4 - Evaluation

The Proof-of-Concept (PoC) phase, often called the evaluation stage, focuses on validating whether the experiment achieved its goals. Using pre-defined metrics—both qualitative and quantitative—you assess the experiment's success, providing evidence of what worked.

This phase translates key learnings into a structured PoC plan, outlining objectives, scope, resources, and success criteria. By bridging experimentation with implementation, the PoC phase reduces risk, ensures alignment, and sets the foundation for scaling impactful solutions.

Implementing innovation can be difficult, but we have built expertise in bringing corporate innovation to success by helping corporates innovate like startups. Reach out to see how we can implement a Venture Mindset in your organization.

Want to start experimenting today?

Download the Tenity Venture Mindset framework.

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