What is a Venture Client and how does it benefit a company?

This innovation vehicle has emerged in recent years as one of the most competitive Open Innovation solutions, but how does it help a company?

Not long ago, we discussed what open innovation is and how it helps companies evolve and adapt to the needs of the market and society in general. Today, we take a deep dive into one of the Open Innovation tools that has surged in popularity among companies in recent years: the Venture Client model. If you’ve heard of it but aren’t quite sure what it means, or if you’ve never encountered the term but are curious about innovation methodologies, you’re in luck. Let’s explore what it is.

A Venture Client is essentially a new model of collaboration between companies aimed at creating open innovation ecosystems. This methodology is based on a scenario where a company facing a problem or challenge in a specific area—where its own expertise or traditional supplier cannot offer a solution—hires a start-up or technology provider to develop a concrete solution. To achieve this, the hiring company (the corporate) conducts an introspective analysis of its main unsolved challenges and explores the market for agents with the necessary expertise to address them.
Sometimes, these start-ups have solutions or products still under development that haven’t yet been tested in a real-world environment, or that come from different sectors than the corporate’s. This presents a good opportunity for both parties to address their needs.

This collaborative format does not involve the corporate acquiring or taking a stake in the start-up, nor is it simply a case of contracting a service like with a traditional supplier. Instead, it’s a mutual collaboration, offering the start-up the chance to test its solutions in a real-world scenario through the corporate acting as a test bay. A classic win-win scenario.

Key Benefits

As previously mentioned, a Venture Client tool offers great advantages and opportunities to both of the main players involved in the agreement. We can identify the following:

• Benefits for start-ups:

• The opportunity to apply their solutions in the real market via an established company
• Improvement and customization of their prototypes
• Increased company value in the market following the proof of concept

• Benefits for corporates:

• Quick and flexible resolution of problems
• Cost reduction
• Reduced investment risk
• Rapid and agile testing of solutions

Ormazabal Startup Switch: Do you know our Venture Client vehicle?

Ormazabal Startup Switch is the first open innovation vehicle of Ormazabal. Its goal is to strengthen the company’s innovation path by identifying new start-ups and technology providers that can support competitiveness through the integration of new technologies, the attraction of diverse talent, and the enhancement of the company’s internal innovation ecosystem.

This new tool, based on the Venture Client model, will enable the creation of collaborative environments with external agents to help solve challenges and issues across the organization horizontally. To achieve this, Ormazabal Startup Switch includes a dedicated website where various challenges for which we seek collaboration are posted. This publicly accessible site allows international start-ups to submit their solutions and proposals with the goal of achieving a proof of concept with Ormazabal for each of these challenges.

This collaboration format offers a growth acceleration opportunity for start-ups, providing a test bay within an established company like Ormazabal, a leader in the electrical sector, where they can test their solutions in real-world conditions.

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