Creating new businesses inside a corporate is a challenging endeavor. Amadeus, a major technology provider for the global travel and tourism industry, has been working with Lean Scaleup to find a different approach which increases the results of their in-house business incubator.
Amadeus’ solutions connect travelers to the journeys they want through travel agents, search engines, tour operators, airlines, airports, hotels, cars and railways. Amadeus combines a deep understanding of how people travel with the ability to design and deliver the most complex, trusted, critical systems its customers need.
In 2019, Amadeus helped connect over 1.9 billion people to local travel providers in over 190 countries.
Nexwave is Amadeus’ business incubator. Our client Steve Kopp leads Nexwave’s incubation office, in charge of strategy, governance, operations, portfolio management and marketing & communications.
In a recent video, Steve shared why Nexwave decided to replace its existing approach to business building and how he sees the fruits of our collaboration emerging.
Steve aims to put in place the best-in-class incubation approach for the Amadeus’ business incubator. The common challenge he sees in the industry is transitioning a validated business concept from Incubation to Scaling-Up and to Core.
That’s why Amadeus Nexwave has actively been preparing to tackle exactly these challenges over the last year. Since some of their portfolio incubations will shortly move into Scaling-Up, Steve and his team have been collaborating with the thought leader in corporate entrepreneurship, Frank Mattes. Together, they have implemented the first modules of the Lean Scaleup framework.
Firstly, unlike the Lean Startup methodology, the Lean Scaleup framework has been designed for corporate venture building. This framework is more business-building centric than product centric and it ensures that the corporate context and the transition to Core is considered right from the inception.
Secondly, a dedicated transition phase has been added after the last incubation stage. This helps pressure-test some of the key elements of the new business, like the collaboration model, the governance, the funding, and the business ownership.
Thirdly, the Lean Scaleup replaces the innovation jargon with proper business language so that that we can all understand each other. There is no more problem/solution-fit or product/market-fit stages, but instead we use proper business language: business foundation stage, business strategy stage or business design stage.
And finally, to really operationalize the framework, the Lean Scaleup team has developed a state-of-the-art business building toolbox just for Amadeus Nexwave.
Now, Amadeus Nexwave is applying this framework to their first corporate startups to successfully transition from the incubation to the acceleration phase.
Our take: We see Amadeus Nexwave as Best Practice, following what companies need for their business building infrastructure: Pre-Scaling validation in the corporate context, Transition to Scaling-Up and Business-building toolbox. These 3 pieces now provide a solid backbone for advancing the individual venture and evaluating the portfolio.