Venture Studio: A Framework for Digital Sustainability Entrepreneurship

Abstract

Climate change and energy, and materials dependency problems in Europe and around the world put a lot of pressure on our societies to develop new innovative and sustainable solutions for a wide array of industries. Venture studios present an interesting tool for sustainable innovation: a single company produces a multitude of startups in a parallel innovation process. However, venture studios are also a relatively new model of business and innovation. What a venture studio actually is and how it could concretely produce new innovative startups in the field of digital sustainability remains a rather tricky question. This thesis examines venture studios and how they could be utilized with digital sustainability in mind. This thesis produces a definition of venture studios, a typology for different types of venture studios, and examines them through different models of funding. After this, the thesis ties these theories with digital sustainability. More specifically, what kinds of everyday routines and qualities the studio should cultivate to excel in digital sustainability? We produce five different venture studio types: founder’s sandbox, entrepreneurial community, company as a product, copy-cat, and strategic partner studio types. As we examine these types in the context of digital sustainability, we come up with the optimizer vs. creator model as a basis to choose a venture studio type. We also produce a set of routines that can be used as a high-level framework for running a digital sustainability venture studio. Finally, interviews with industry experts both validate and challenge our ideas: Typing venture studios based on go-to-market strategy is found to be an interesting new angle for future research, as the typology in this thesis might not capture the whole business model of different studio types well.