Taking a Venture Studio Approach to Drive Blockchain Adoption Such a setup lets organizations and emerging startups to develop, from the ground up, multiple closely related projects, using their own ideas and resources
By Floyd DCosta
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
You're reading Entrepreneur Asia Pacific, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.
In the present year, blockchain technology has moved beyond the world of crypto and towards transforming the financial services industry as a whole. New use cases are constantly emerging and blockchain-based digital transformation initiatives are receiving significant investments as they go on to impact even the most conventional branches of banking and financial services sectors worldwide.
While widespread adoption of the technology is yet to happen, the venture building approach—a movement attributed to the rapid pace of innovation in tech and other start-up companies—has been gaining traction in the world of blockchain as well.
A venture studio setup lets organizations and emerging startups to develop, from the ground up, multiple closely related projects, using their own ideas and resources. The focus then is on innovation and harnessing synergy within the portfolio in development. This move could offer a promising way to drive the mainstream adoption of blockchain technology, quickly. Here's how.
In-house Innovation
One of the biggest advantages of venture builders is the ability to keep all innovation in-house – every project under consideration and development comes from their internal teams, who brainstorm and bring up the idea till a specific stage. Like a venture capital firm, venture builders fund interesting initiatives, invest time and resources to build up projects and, once ready, spin them off as standalone products which they can choose to exit from.
All the tools, technologies, talent and resources to bring up an idea into development happens within the single venture studio, which lets them have complete visibility and involvement in all projects right from the beginning. This gives them an edge over incubators that partner with startups for a limited period of time, from a much later stage in the project lifecycle.
Complete Progress
Also, unlike accelerators and incubators, each project does not compete with the other, which makes it possible to share best practices and innovative ideas with each other for all-round progress. Venture builders, therefore, can scale their projects faster and gain an upper hand over conventional startups, incubators and accelerators which have limited investment and talent.
When it comes to the fintech industry, and specifically blockchain-based projects, the venture builder approach can foster innovation and speed up the launch of promising projects that can transform the industry. Some leading venture builders in the blockchain space are focused on the development and launch of solutions that leverage the distributed ledger technology for faster, scalable and more efficient ways to transform financial services.
Maximizing Success
Venture studios focused on the blockchain space within fintech are able to test out ideas fast and seed this emerging market with the best possible solutions that have the highest likelihood of garnering mainstream adoption. Starting from the initial stage of narrowing down challenges and designing pointed solutions to fix them, to developing the applications, and then partnering with industry leaders to co-create and launch these projects, venture builders have the necessary tools and networks to maximize the chances of success of each blockchain-based project brought to market.
Given the breadth of influence, venture builders also have the potential to forge strategic partnerships with industry leaders, regulators, and other key stakeholders, offering a higher level of brand awareness to each emerging use case being explored and developed. In an emerging space like that of blockchain which is driven by innovation, venture builders backed by industry experts can help not only channel development of most promising projects, but also provide necessary support to convince the industry of the benefits of adopting such a transformative technology.
The more the number of successful projects rolled out from a venture studio, the higher its potential to impact the market segment positively. This holds true especially within financial services, where campaigning for key changes to regulations that allow for innovation can be strategic for startups across the sector.
The ability to influence widespread change and adoption of an emerging technology within a market will, in turn, enable a venture builder to lead by example a multitude of organizations, startups and incumbent enterprises alike, into a blockchain-enabled digitally transformed industry.
