Venture Builders' Program Design and the Creation of Scaleups

The Venture-Building model has increasingly gained popularity in recent years across Europe as a promising model of innovation and entrepreneurship that can help mitigate the risks of startup creation and maximize the chances of success. In contrast with traditional business acceleration programs that support existing startups – who already have a founding team and a somewhat developed idea - with resources and networks, Venture-Builders are concerned with creating or building new startups starting only from an idea. They typically aim to create scalable companies or scaleups from the outset, drawing on the expertise of entrepreneurs-in-residence who have previous entrepreneurial successes under their belt. As Venture-Builders have gained in popularity and success, a host of different actors, such as venture capitalists and business angels, universities, private companies and public sector institutions, have started to develop and implement their own Venture-Builders. These differ in various aspects, such as the infrastructure they make available to the startups, the degree of control they exercise, the extent to which they focus on specific sectors or technologies, where they seek ideas, how many ventures they build at the same time, and their relationship to funding sources. These aspects are, however, also connected with the ability of firms to scale and grow. Different Venture-Building models may thus be more, or less, suited to fulfilling the promise of creating scaleup companies, that exhibit sustainable growth, consistently over time. Therefore, the paper attempts to shed light on the previously unexplored link between the features of the Venture Building process and the creation of scaleup companies. Through a series of interviews conducted on Venture-Builders across Europe, set up by different types of actors, we create different archetypes of Venture-Builders and discuss their suitability to producing scaleups.