Growth through start-ups
Around 2006 Philips realized that disruptive innovations do not start in mass markets, rather in niche markets that value the unique selling point. However this requires new capabilities, non-traditional ways of working and patience, similar to a venture capital approach. Therefore it established a novel way of working, a staged new business development process run by dedicated, agile organizations (like a start-ups), supervised at board level and executed by entrepreneurs.

To manage this Philips used the Bell-Mason methodology. This is a framework for Corporate Venture Development and describes a 5 phase process for building incubated ventures within a corporation. It describes best practice requirements by stage for the entire venture business, not just for the product, and does not impose corporate requirements and overhead that stifle the agility that growing ventures need.

Communications approach for small venture teams
As these start-ups were so agile at the start (they typically start with a team of 3-5 people), they did not have their own communications or marketing staff. That is why I set-up an approach to support these ventures with communications, ranging from advising on the positioning of their venture and offerings, coaching and training, to name creation, campaigns, communication planning, and asset creation. Some elements of this were:

• Standardized branding approach: Decision tree on required branding, naming approach, agency selection (taking market, budget and objectives into account)
• Marcomshop: Implemented a tool to automate the creation of communications assets like brochures, leaflets and invitations, supporting teams to work brand-compliant and with an integrated workflow.
• Communications academy: Series of training sessions on selected communications topics, with external speakers, and a forum to exchange experiences.

Results
This approach has helped the ventures to create solid branding approaches. It also helped to streamline the IP process for the creation of the brands. Some of the ventures I worked with have since then spun-out of Philips, like Cordian, Intrinsic-ID and Priv-ID, or been integrated in Philips, like Aerasense or Lumalive.

The Marcomshop led to significant efficiency savings, taking away the costs and time for design of the deliverables, while the communications academy helped improve the capabilities of the teams.