Why Companies Don’t Need to Build Their Own Venturing Team

Many companies respond to increasing innovation pressure by building their own venturing or innovation unit. The expectation behind this: a specialized team should identify external technologies and bring them into the organization faster. In practice, however, a different pattern often emerges. New units increase visibility for innovation, but the actual implementation barriers remain. 

Because the central challenges in most organizations lie not only in access to innovative solutions. The bottleneck also lies in clear decision-making logic, operational implementation, and integration into existing structures. In addition, building internal scouting and validation competence simultaneously requires time, experience, and continuous volume, which many organizations only build up efficiently over years. 

Central Insight: A Venturing Team Does Not Replace a Functioning System 

An internal team does create focus on external innovation. At the same time, it continues to operate within the same organizational logic, budget cycles, and governance structures of the company. In practice, a similar pattern often emerges: a venturing team identifies promising innovations. However, as soon as concrete tests within the company are to take place, the existing structures must be involved: prioritization by specialist departments, governance and procurement processes, IT and integration capability, and budget and decision cycles. 

Without a clear process for these steps, isolated proof of concepts (PoCs) or pilot projects often emerge whose decision paths remain unclear. The alternative is not to forego venturing, but to organize it differently: more and morecompanies are relying on Venturing-as-a-Service (VaaS) — a model in which external partners take over a structured venturing process and act as an operational unit. 

Five Reasons Why Building Your Own Venturing Unit Is Often Unnecessary 

1. Innovation demand is rarely constant 

 Venturing activities usually run in strategic phases. Sometimes there is high demand, sometimes the topic takes a back seat. Fixed internal structures then face fluctuating demand with correspondingly bound capacity. An external venturing unit can be used more flexibly here: it is activated project-by-project when specific innovation fields are to be addressed, and scales according to actual demand. 

2. Early-phase innovation collides with established company logic 

 Company structures are primarily designed for stability, scaling, and risk mitigation. Processes, IT architectures, and governance accordingly follow clear security and compliance requirements. Early innovation phases work differently, however. They require quick tests, limited experiments, and the ability to validate solutions in a small framework first. An external venturing unit can organize these early validation steps outside regular company processes. Solutions are first tested via small tests or pilots before being transferred into the company’s regular structures. 

3. Build-up time and expectation pressure are frequently underestimated  

A functioning venturing unit needs more than just a team. Necessary elements include: clear governance structures, defined roles between the innovation team and specialist departments, decision logic for PoC and pilot, and coordinated KPI and budget mechanics. Building these structures takes time and internal coordination before operational impact emerges. An external venturing unit already brings this process architecture and can immediatelyapply it to concrete innovation projects. 

4. Fixed structures meet limited resources  

Especially in the Mittelstand and in many corporate areas, the actual innovation throughput is limited. A permanently established unit then generates organizational fixed costs and additional coordination requirements. An external venturing arm enables a leaner setup instead: specialist departments are only involved when concrete tests take place, and internal resources remain focused on operational priorities. 

5. Too little volume for genuine specialization 

 In most companies, only a few relevant venturing projects arise per year. With five to ten potential innovation cases per year, experience builds up internally only slowly. Comparative data is lacking, learning curves remain flat, and pattern recognition develops only to a limited extent. External venturing units, by contrast, work across multiple companies and projects. Through this higher volume, experience is gained more quickly about which technologies, pilot formats, or cooperation models actually work. 

Why This Is Relevant for Your Company 

For successful external innovation, a clearly structured process is decisive — one that makes it possible to test external solutions in a targeted way, relieve the internal organization, and make well-founded decisions for or against implementation. In practice, an externally supported approach is often more efficient than building an internal organization. Particularly for companies with limited resources or irregular innovation demand, this model can be a significantly more flexible alternative. 

If you would like to explore how external innovation can be structured and led through to the pilot, a brief exchange can help to assess typical bottlenecks and possible approaches. 

👤 Justin Gemeri – Co-Founder & Business Development Manager 

📧 justin.gemeri@ekipa.de 

📞 +49 151 525 924 17