With venture studios being a hot topic in 2022, we caught up with Steve Blank, author, blogger, and adjunct professor at Stanford University, to pose a question: what’s the difference between an incubator, accelerator, and venture studio?
As Blank defines it, “A venture studio is different than most of these existing constructs of accelerators and incubators. They create startups by incubating their own ideas or ideas from their partners. It’s a company that basically does the pre-digestion of reducing risk. They search for product-market fit, they search for the initial customers, they might build the first set of MVPs or even deliver the first products. And when things don’t work, they kill them internally.”
Blank; InnoLead Founder and CEO Scott Kirsner; and InnoLead Chief Growth Officer Alex Slawsby, discuss internal vs. external venture studios, and touch on the challenges of attracting talent for this type of work, and compensating people like true entrepreneurs.
Venture studios, Blank says, can “give corporate executives and people thinking about innovation inside of companies another frame, to think about, how do we generate additional profit and revenue with the resources we have…?”
