Jacob Dutton explains how to set up an Innovation Engine Board, an internal investment team of senior executives who act like venture capitalists within your company. They take fiduciary responsibility for new ventures, adopt an investor mindset that encourages strategic risk-taking, and create funding checkpoints that innovators must hit.
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I think the good news is that the principles of venture-based investing are pretty easy to grasp and internalize within your own companies. So, um, we've boiled them down into 7 that you can take back to work after this episode. And the first thing that you have to do is to assemble a team of investors inside your company. At Future Foundry, when we help clients to do this, we call them the Innovation Engine Board. And It's usually made up of a group of senior execs whose job it is to act as the internal VC to your ideas, right? You know, the ventures, products, and services that you are working on, but they also act as a fiduciary for the company's overall investment in them. You know, these are people who can step out of their traditional managerial roles and adopt the mindset of an investor, you know, advocating for growth, encouraging very strategic risk-taking, and guiding you and, you know, the rest of the innovation team on what it is that you need to prove to raise the investment in your ideas at different checkpoints, just in the same way that, you know, a traditional VC would. Now, this might seem like a big change in mindset for some of the leaders within your organizations to make, but it is critical if you're going to drive successful corporate innovation.
