Corporate Business Incubator Portfolio Management

Abstract

A corporate business incubator captures ideas and develops them into new start-up ventures. It is programs or environment or resources employed by corporations to maintain its strategic position, avoid its mainstream business becoming obsolete, explore new businesses, or simply to gain more financially. Due to the stream of new venture ideas, before the development of these new venture starts, corporate business incubators need to carefully select which ideas are to be pursued in their portfolio in order to avoid bad investments. A corporate business incubator’s environment is largely influenced by the economic and strategic situations of its mother organization. Its portfolio’s objectives are, in most cases, steered towards gaining a strategic advantage for its mother organization. Therefore, it has to flexibly adjust itself to follow the direction of its mother organization. In organizing its portfolio, corporate business incubators typically utilize a certain process, where ongoing venture projects are selected, monitored and assessed throughout different stages of development process. Often, venture ideas change its target market/consumer, revenue streams, or even the whole business model through the different stages. This is quite normal, however, in a dynamic environment such as that of a corporate business incubator’s, where impact of changes always need to be assessed towards the fit with the mother organization’s current economic and business situation, the validity of go/no-go decisions at each end of stage becomes crucial. In this thesis we perform a designing approach on how to support decision makers of a corporate business incubator in making evidence-based go/no-go decisions that take the dynamic environment of the incubator into account in order to have viable and feasible venture projects in the portfolio. More specifically, this paper focuses on two central questions: (i) What are the problems of a corporate business incubator’s portfolio selection (ii) How to select and manage a corporate business incubator’s portfolio with the objective of generating viable and feasible venture projects. The study is performed at ABN AMRO’s business incubator, The Dialogues Incubator, located in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Our methods include an exploration of the literature in the related topics namely business incubators, portfolio management, New Product Development (NPD), New Service Development (NSD), venture capital (VC) and decision support systems (DSS). The research also involves an observation at how the current organization of venture project selection at the Dialogues Incubator’s portfolio selection model through interviews with the decision makers. The results of both studies will be collaborated into a proposal of a decision making framework and decision criteria for the go/no-go decisions. In parallel, a proof of concept in a form of software will be developed. This proof of concept will complement the proposed framework to support decision makers with evidences/information when making decisions. The evaluation and implementation of the proposed framework and the accompanying decision support tool have yet to be performed, which implicates a future study.