It’s rather unfortunate that most of the best actionable content for digital innovation is often written solely from the angle of startups, where you’re building upon a clean table. The reality, after all, is that >90% of the world’s current value is tied to legacy systems and organizations, as well as existing management practices— and with good reason: Old strategies and systems have been trialed and tested by time, and they’ve simply been proven to work.

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Coventures was founded on the core beliefs of collaboration and co-creation. We believe that the working together of entrepreneurs and corporations can make for a much better world, as opposed to their working separately.

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Corporations are better at extracting value when startups are better at creating value – can we combine their strengths?

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Their flaw is not so much in their functionality, per se, but in that they just aren’t the best breeding places for building new disruptive businesses; hence, their vulnerability to the threat of disruption. Corporations are very good at extracting value when startups are good at creating value.

In today’s world, it’s rare for things to be completely clear or precisely determinable. Not everything is black and white — even pink is a viable option. The demands on modern organizations and management are more contradictory and paradoxical than ever before, challenging orthodox value systems and business principles. In a world where the “what” takes a back seat to the “why?”, making bold decisions requires courage, awareness, and a willingness to make mistakes.

Successful digital transformation programs address these two specific areas

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In digital transformation, this ambiguity is often forgotten. More often than not, it’s a battle of the “new” against the “old”, where participants are relatively locked in with regards to their positions. Be it about innovation, agile, lean, or teal, there seldom is enough understanding and communication between the participants across teams.

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Digital transformation programs typically fail due to this reason, and we strongly believe that successful transformations require the marriage between two skills:

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1. The C-level P&L understanding on the implications of the transformation program, and 
2. The entrepreneurial hands on understanding on how to actually deliver the results. This rare ambidextrous skill-set is the key for coping in the 21st century.

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You can analyze which component you need to work on by asking yourself the following: Are you experiencing low levels of investment, or low return on your investments?

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Coventures’ group of entrepreneurs help incumbent organizations in three distinct areas:

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1. Helping incumbents craft ambidextrous innovation strategies to prepare for digital disruption. 
2. Building new ventures for incumbents in accordance to their overall innovation strategy. 
3. Supporting the new ventures to succeed.

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With our experience and extensive background as digital entrepreneurs, we have come to understand deeply both the corporate realities and the new digital business models. Entrepreneurs often like to simplify things as much as possible. 

Instead of long (and expensive) corporate change programs, our approach to digital transformation is a unique and simple one with heavy focus on creating actual tangible revenues from new business initiatives and enabling clear communication between all levels of management. 

Our focus thus lies in areas such as having a clear strategic narrative and business case for innovation, addressing the need for stellar product leadership to enable innovation, and having actual entrepreneurs at the helm to enable the building of ventures.

In case you would like to have deeper insight into the concept of product-led organization, I encourage you to check out our publication Product-Led Strategy – A Manager’s Guide to Building Value in the Digital Era.

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