Venture Builder
Incubation StrategyHow might we create a process that allows us to develop better startups that solve industrial pains?
Challenge
Gesta Ventures launched in 2018 with the aim of being the first venture builder with a focus towards industry and supply chain 4.0 solutions. As a team of technical experts in emerging technologies such as Internet of Things, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence they had a development-centric approach to creating new solutions.
Approach
Taking inspiration from Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Agile methodologies to structure our own model for venture design. We aimed to shift from a technical focused to a holistic approach that humanizes our potential customers’ needs.
Developed and piloted a Design Thinking for Industry 4.0 toolkit that different team members, including developers, data scientists and mechatronics engineers used to understand our potential customer’s problem space.
Multidisciplinary collaboration
Working with all levels of the organization to structure a process flow allowed us to listen to our customer’s earlier in the process. Due to the size of the team we had to empower everyone to continuously practice empathy across the different phases of the development process.
Outcome
Taking inspiration from Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Agile we structured our own process towards the creation of new ventures.
Discover: Understanding the problem space and target market.
Assess: Validating interest in our solution, creating a proof of concept and iterating.
Build: Developing our Minimum Viable Product based on a strategic feature roadmap.
Scale: Growing the reach and speed to market for our new solution.
Our methodology expanded from a process for creating new ventures, to one also used to transform recently founded startups. Our portfolio of company’s transforming industries and supply chains does so by clearly profiling user’s needs and how they fit into an organization’s operational strategy.