The business of building businesses
By: Communications
A new generation of successful companies could increasingly be created by start-up ‘factories’ rather than entrepreneurs working alone, according to new University of East Anglia (UEA) research.
These organisations, known as venture studios, build and launch multiple businesses.
Rather than focusing on a single start-up, they generate ideas, recruit founders, develop products and bring multiple new companies to market.
The study found more than 1,000 venture studios are now operating worldwide, with numbers growing by around 18 per cent each year.
The research suggests venture studios can apply lessons learned from one business to the next, helping make entrepreneurship more repeatable and scalable.
Internationally, venture studios are already behind a range of high-profile businesses.
US-based Flagship Pioneering helped create biotechnology company Moderna, which developed one of the first widely used Covid-19 vaccines, while Italy's Mamazen Startup Studio, which featured in the study, has launched businesses across sectors including food, pet care and sport.
Closer to home, London-based Founders Factory has backed more than 500 start-ups globally since 2015, supporting ventures in areas ranging from healthcare and financial services to climate technology and artificial intelligence.
Researchers say the growing success of venture studios suggests they could play an increasingly important role in how new companies are created, funded and scaled in the future.
Building businesses at scale
Dr Davide Viglialoro, from UEA's Norwich Business School, said: “Entrepreneurship is often viewed as something driven by individual founders working on a single idea. What we found is the emergence of organisations specifically designed to create multiple companies in a systematic and repeatable way.
“Venture studios are taking the lessons learned from previous start-ups and embedding them into their organisations through shared teams, playbooks and structured processes. This means every new venture starts with a higher level of knowledge and experience.
“We found that some venture studios are simultaneously working on as many as 15 start-ups at a time. The venture studios we surveyed had created an average of 10 start-ups, while some reported creating as many as 120.”
Unlike incubators, accelerators, venture capital firms or angel investor groups, venture studios are directly involved in creating companies and often retain ownership stakes in the businesses they develop.
The study reveals that venture studios typically follow a common business creation process, moving from idea generation and market testing through to team formation, product development, launch and eventual sale or handover.
Dr Viglialoro said: “A key finding is that venture studios don't simply support entrepreneurs. They institutionalise entrepreneurial learning. Knowledge gained from one start-up can be captured, refined and reused across multiple ventures, making entrepreneurship more repeatable and scalable.”
The researchers say venture studios could play an increasingly important role in helping create businesses that are ready to attract investment while reducing some of the uncertainty associated with starting a company.
Their findings challenge the idea that entrepreneurship must always depend on individual founders, suggesting organisations can also play a direct role in creating and developing new businesses.
“Venture studios are emerging as a new organisational model for innovation and venture creation,” added Dr Viglialoro.
“Their ability to combine experienced founders, specialist teams and structured learning processes allows them to repeatedly generate and test new business opportunities.
"This has important implications for entrepreneurs, investors, universities and policymakers.”
The study also suggests venture studios could help speed up the journey from research to successful businesses through partnerships with universities, research institutes and technology transfer organisations.
A growing global phenomenon
To examine the rise of these business 'factories', researchers created a global database of 1,006 venture studios before conducting case studies involving 12 studios across Europe, interviews with international venture studio networks and a worldwide survey.
The database identified venture studios across five continents, with the largest concentrations found in the Americas and Europe.
Interest in the venture studio model is growing among both researchers and investors. Earlier this year, the first academic symposium dedicated to venture studios was held at the University of Cambridge, bringing together international researchers and industry experts to discuss the sector's development and impact.
The research began during Dr Viglialoro's PhD after he encountered Mamazen, a venture studio based in his home city of Turin, Italy.
What started as a single case study led to a project to identify venture studios as a distinct and rapidly growing organisational model, prompting a global investigation into how the sector has evolved.
The paper, ‘Institutionalizing portfolio entrepreneurship: the Venture Studio model’, is published in the journal Technovation.
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