Читать книгу Governance of Ventures - Группа авторов - Страница 21

The expertise challenge in ventures is two-fold. Firstly, as fast growth is imperative for successful ventures and entrepreneurial organizations are constantly in transition (Gabrielsson and Huse 2017), the capability requirements change over time. Secondly, entrepreneurs have to think in terms of options, and hence require a broad range of capabilities to act quickly if a timely option emerges.

Ventures usually experience five strategic trajectories in their quest to survive and succeed:

– Spin-around: Ventures are primed to pivot their strategies or business models should the market fail to respond as expected, or conditions change. Given the limited resources and market experience, approaches like pretotyping (Savoia 2019) or prototyping are well suited.

– Scale-up: To survive and thrive against competing ventures, rapid growth is essential (Thiel 2014; Hoffman and Yeh 2019). This requires a concerted approach to rapid scaling-up and winning clients and customers.

– Sum-up: As markets mature, being in the driving seat of industry consolidation becomes vital for success. Relevant skills in deal-making and organizational integration are essential.

– [21] Spin-off: At the same time, successful venture leadership teams require the courage to offload businesses that may thrive under different ownership. This posits the mental maturity to accept new realities and detach from personal connections to a business.

– Smarten-up: Along the way, ventures that professionalize their operations will be better positioned to compete with other new upstarts or smartly managed existing businesses. This, again, requires a different skillset.

Exhibit 6: Venture diamond (Hilb 2018, venturediamond.com)

The specific capability requirements of ventures should be reflected at the management and board level. This challenge is accentuated because ventures are limited by their financial resources (Feld and Ramsinghani 2014), and may have smaller boards (Garg and Furr 2017). Consequently, managers and board members often wear multiple hats. At the same time, they need a deep expertise in venture-specific areas based on their experience and exposure to similar situations.