Operate Like a Venture Capitalist: A Better Approach to Corporate Innovation

Traditional corporate innovation often struggles to keep pace with the agility and boldness of venture capital-backed startups. But what if enterprise innovation leaders adopted the mindset and mechanisms of venture capitalists?

This webcast features Jonathan Livescault, Managing Director at ITONICS, and Henri Deshays, Partner at Newfund, discussing how leading organizations can unlock growth by applying VC principles to their innovation strategy. You’ll discover how to:

• Build a balanced innovation portfolio with risk-adjusted bets
• Create governance models that accelerate decision-making
• Establish funding frameworks that encourage experimentation
• Identify, invest in, and scale high-potential ideas faster.

The video replay is above, and slides are available in PDF form below. We conducted several polls as part of this webcast, including:

Highlights from the discussion:

1. Establish a Clear Innovation Mandate Aligned with Leadership Expectations

Before any innovation work begins, corporate teams must define their purpose, success metrics, and scope—just like VCs define their investment thesis. As Livescault put it, the “innovation mandate is to make sure everything is crystal clear between your leadership and the innovation function… What’s your playground? What’s in your scope? What’s not in your scope?” Without this upfront alignment, it becomes difficult to hold teams accountable or measure success meaningfully.

2. Invest Time in Building a Scalable Opportunity Sourcing Engine

Innovation requires volume—lots of ideas to choose from—before narrowing focus. That means proactively scanning external trends and internal capabilities, and creating repeatable systems for identifying opportunity areas. “You need to scan,” said Livescault, “and you need to find a way to scale… It’s a volume game.” Just as venture capital firms might review thousands of startups to fund a handful, innovation teams must cast a wide net to discover the ideas worth investing in that can drive future broths.

3. Adopt a Portfolio Management Approach to Balance Risk and Resources

Much like venture capitalists manage a mix of high-risk and high-reward investments, corporate innovators need to track initiatives holistically and adjust funding accordingly. “You need to actively manage this portfolio, as a professional investor, I would say, to maximize the value of this portfolio over time,” said Livescault. This means killing underperformers, doubling down on traction, and avoiding the trap of spreading resources too thinly across too many efforts.

4. Calibrate Investment Levels and Incentives for Project Teams

Resources and incentives should be tailored to each project’s maturity and ambition—not handed out evenly. “You need to make sure you are sizing the investment in the right way,” explained Livescault, adding that “teams work always work better under constraints.” Structuring funding around milestones and aligning incentives to meaningful outcomes can drive more focused execution and more founder-like accountability within teams.

5. Plan Early for Transitions and Ownership Handoffs

Innovative ideas often stall not because of a bad product, but because of a poor transition to the operational teams responsible for scaling them. To prevent this, Livescault stressed that “you need to sell the project to the next team, and you need to start selling it before it’s ready to be sold.” That means engaging stakeholders early, setting expectations, and ensuring there’s a clear plan for integration long before the project is fully baked.

Host Bios

Jonathan Livescault, Managing Director at ITONICS

Jonathan is the Managing Director of ITONICS Corp, the AI-empowered Innovation software helping 500 Enterprise customers generate predictable results at scale. Jonathan has 15+ years of experience in Innovation management and strategy consulting, with a background in private equity and investment banking. Jonathan holds an MBA from Duke, the Fuqua School of Business and ESSEC.

Henri Deshays, Partner at Newfund

Henri started his career in investment banking at Natixis. He then moved to the US to pursue a MBA at Stanford, where he founded ModeWalk, acquired in 2014 by Moda Operandi. Prior to joining Newfund, Henri was an angel investor and VP Strategy at StartX, Stanford’s accelerator, which he co-founded when studying at Stanford.

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