Is a Venture Studio Right for Your Company?

A structured approach to building multiple ventures can unlock innovation, but leaders must assess strategic fit, resources, and long-term commitment before diving in.

- By Constanze Coelsch-Foisner and Fiona E. Murray

VENTURE STUDIOS ARE EMERGing as a compelling — if resource-intensive — way for organizations to maximize value creation through innovation. Pioneered by organizations such as Google, the studio model offers a structured and systematic approach to venture creation inside an organization. But before adopting it, leaders must ask: Is a studio the right fit for our context, and what resources and capabilities must we deploy to make it work?

Whether established as standalone entities, embedded within investment funds, or housed inside large corporations, universities, or government organizations, venture studios systematically assemble ideas, people, and resources to create multiple new ventures.¹ Their teams first identify and shape promising opportunity spaces, and then they recruit entrepreneurs into those spaces and cofound ventures with shared equity. Subsequently, they advance multiple ventures in parallel through structured experimentation, apply rigorous down-selection (narrowing the field of choices), and provide ongoing operational support until ventures are either terminated, chosen to remain within the organization, or spun out as independent companies. According to our analysis and industry reports, the number of independent and in-house venture studios doubled from 2018 to 2023, to number 870.2

While the studio model is popular, it is not without its challenges. The high equity stakes and operational control that venture studios often maintain can deter competent founders from joining the new ventures and external investors from allocating funds in follow-on rounds. In addition, supporting multiple ventures simultaneously with substantial investment before any returns materialize creates capital requirements that may exceed available resources. Without careful and rigorous down-selection, the pipeline becomes diluted, weakening the funnel logic that is central to effective venture development and scaling.