Conviction Over Certainty.
The real starting point for corporate ventures.

The boardroom wants proof before it places a bet

We get the instinct. Before committing real money to a new venture, the organisation wants to see the evidence: market sizing, competitive landscape, financial projections with a defensible set of assumptions. The full deck. And this feels like rigour because it looks like rigour.

But here's what that rigour actually produces in practice. We've watched it happen at energy companies, at FMCG conglomerates, at industrial firms with century-old risk management cultures. The team spends four months building a model. The model requires assumptions about a market that doesn't fully exist yet. Those assumptions get challenged by the risk committee, which asks for more data. By the time the venture is approved, six to nine months have passed. And the window that made the opportunity interesting in the first place? It's narrower. Sometimes it's gone.

The ventures built on false precision launch late, into opportunities that closed while the models were being updated. We see this pattern so often it has a shape: the business case is rigorous, the market has moved, and everyone is confused about what went wrong.

Conviction is a testable belief, and it changes everything

The starting point for a real venture is conviction. A specific claim about the world that could be proven wrong, and that you're willing to stake something on.

Here's what conviction sounds like: "We believe the distribution model in this industry is about to invert, and the incumbent with the right asset base is positioned to capture the transition." That's specific. It's directional. And it's falsifiable, which means you can design an experiment to test it within 90 days.

Compare that with: "We believe there's a significant market opportunity in digital transformation." That's a sentence that could appear in any deck, at any company, in any year since 2015. There's nothing to test because there's nothing specific enough to be wrong about.

Write the belief before the business case. If you can't articulate what you specifically believe about this market that most people don't, you don't have conviction. You have hope.

The belief is what gets tested. The business case is just arithmetic layered on top of it. And the arithmetic only matters if the belief holds up under pressure. We've found that teams who can write their conviction in a single paragraph, with specificity and directional claims, are the ones who build ventures that survive their first contact with reality. The ones who can't tend to build elaborate models around vague feelings. Those models look impressive. They don't survive.

What changes when you start from conviction

Conviction dilutes in committees

Here's the most underestimated failure mode we encounter. A venture starts with genuine conviction. One person, usually a BU leader or a senior intrapreneur, holds a specific, directional belief about a market transition. The belief is sharp. It has edge.

Then it enters the approval process. The steering committee wants adjustments. The innovation board suggests broadening the scope. The executive sign-off process asks for more conservative assumptions. By the time everyone has weighed in, the original belief has been sanded down into something the whole room can agree with.

And something the whole room can agree with, almost by definition, has no edge. It's a consensus view of the market. Consensus views don't produce asymmetric ventures.

The window for a venture is the period just before the market is obvious. That discomfort is the signal. It's where asymmetric advantage lives.

Harvard Business Review's research on venture-minded organisations frames this well: the venture mindset favours the individual over the group, disagreement over consensus, exceptions over dogma. GCV's data adds the structural proof: CVC-backed ventures with direct CEO reporting lines are half as likely to fail as those without (4.7 percent bankruptcy rate versus 9.5 percent). The conviction stays sharp because one person owns it with their name and their performance attached. When conviction becomes communal, it becomes cautious. And cautious ventures, in our experience, die slowly and expensively.

How to start from conviction

The practical version of this is simpler than the theory suggests. Before any modelling, before any market sizing, write one paragraph: what do we specifically believe about this market that most people don't? Be directional. Be falsifiable. Be willing to be wrong.

Then run a 90-day conviction sprint. Define the three most critical things that need to be true for the venture to work. Design the smallest, fastest test for each one. At 90 days you'll have evidence. You won't have certainty, but you'll have something better: a tested belief with real-world data behind it. That's enough to make a real decision, or to walk away with something learned rather than something lost.

EY-Parthenon's research found that business leaders directed 15 percent of their operating budget toward venture building in 2023, nearly double the year before. The appetite is there and growing. What's often missing is the starting point. Organisations jump to the business case because that's the muscle they've built over decades. The conviction step gets skipped because it feels informal, subjective, insufficiently rigorous.

But every venture we've helped build that worked, across 47 engagements in 12 countries, started with a specific belief held by a specific person. The ones that started with a spreadsheet rarely survived long enough to test anything.