- Grant and defend autonomy. New ventures thrive when provided the freedom and agency to continually shape their own best practices, unencumbered by organizational history, politics, or legacy systems.
- Drive continuous engagement. Emphasize deep collaboration, transparent workflows, and flat teams to gain efficiency, continuity, and capability across all contributors. Cumulatively, this enables the founder’s mindset of co-ownership and emphasis on impact.
- Prioritize progress over process. Seek and exploit opportunities to move further faster. New venture teams should jump ahead whenever possible, rather than adhering to a rigid process.
- Design the impact, not the product. Define and work toward clear business objectives, focusing on what is necessary and sufficient for success. The required impact is the constant, and how you achieve it is the variable, not the other way around.
The potential impacts of venture design are many and varied. A key objective is to reduce complexity and increase the throughput of innovation activities, helping both young and mature companies to grow profitably.
The nature of competition has changed dramatically as a result of the march of technology, accelerated globalization, and vanishing barriers to entry, moving us from a timeline sustained advantage was a realizable goal, to one where transient advantage has become our new reality. In this reality, innovation and playing to win move from being an aspiration or sideshow to being a critical activity for our future growth, equal in importance to the playing not to lose work that grows and optimizes our current business. Principles of Venture Design can leverage this reality by incorporating frameworks like design thinking, systems thinking, and lean startup methodology to design new, disruptive businesses.
