As most start-up teams only realise the importance of venture governance when it is too late, we have the dveleoped five questions founders and their venture teams should ask themselves at the front-end of their start-up journey:
- How to start an open venture together with multiple co-founders and partners?
- How to keep the balance between contribution & rewards of the venture team members?
- What types of contributions do we need? What kind of rewards can we offer?
- How to deal with he need for ventures to attract different skillsets? Which skills do we need at the start and how do these change over time?
- How to combine an economical viable business model with a purpose or social entrepreneurship?
If those 5 questions are being discussed, we believe a venture team is already close to having a first implicit design of its venture governance.
A well designed venture governance model should consist of a framework to capture the venture team’s values, their roles, contributions & rewards as well as the rules of engagement. A venture governance model is by default dynamic. It should enable the team to adapt the governance framework to the changing business requirements during pivots and the different scaling phases.
Open Incubation is a venture governance model that adresses the 5 venture related questions following four building blocks: Roles & Contribution, Rewards, Values, and Rules of Engagement
