On April 12, the Embiggen Group announced that it had been awarded the Silver Stevie Award in the Most Innovative Startup of the Year—Business Service Industries category during the 10th annual Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards. The winners will be celebrated during a virtual awards ceremony on June 27.
The Stevie Awards are premier business achievement awards recognizing excellence in organizations of all sizes all over the world. The Embiggen Group was among 800 organizations across the Asia-Pacific considered for awards across a wide variety of categories, with the Embiggen Group eventually winning its Silver Stevie Award thanks to its complete suite of innovation services as a corporate venture builder.
After all, innovation is nothing new for Embiggen. As of writing, Embiggen is the sole independent corporate venture builder in the Philippines. This puts Embiggen in stark contrast with other venture builders in the country, which either refrain from partnering with corporations or are owned entirely by one conglomerate (leaving them unable to partner with anyone else).
Embiggen also already has plans to move beyond the Philippines, with steps being taken to move the venture builder into the US, Europe, South America, the Middle East, and ASEAN.
Embiggen was founded in 2019 by founding CEO & managing partner Rolan Marco Garcia, alongside founding partners & board members Earl Martin Valencia, Paul Amerigo Pajo, and Famida Alonto. So far, Embiggen already has an impressive roster of organizations it has partnered/worked with: Globe Telecom, Aboitiz, European Chamber of Commerce in the Philippines, and more make up the list.
According to Garcia, the venture builder is proud to offer something inherently unique to corporations. “There is nowhere else corporations can go to “hire” the diverse and highly skilled talent we have at Embiggen unless they build their own team which is both very risky and costly,” Garcia explained.
Inside building a venture
Garcia is more than aware of the unique position Embiggen occupies. After all, the ventures that Embiggen builds with corporations can leverage the advantages of both the startup and corporations.
“These ventures have access to the innovative and adaptable approach of startups, which is often lacking in corporations. They can also tap into the abundant financial resources that startups typically lack,” said Garcia. “By harnessing the benefits of these two realms, corporate-built startups significantly enhance their chances of achieving success.”
Garcia stresses that Embiggen’s unique blend of corporate and startup is possible thanks to the people behind it. Its talent and leadership team holds extensive experience innovating with both corporations and startups. Its founding partners have all come from positions with companies like Amazon and Smart and even hold work experience in Silicon Valley.
The four phases of venture building
Yet harnessing the benefits of the startup and corporate worlds is also a delicate balancing act. To that end, Embiggen adopts an intricate approach to building a venture from the ground up, dividing the process into four distinct phases each with its own unique metrics and goals.
First is the ‘Discovery’ phase where Embiggen looks at market problems, customer problems, jobs-to-be-done, and market intelligence. In fact, this emphasis on problem-solving is apparent when potential clients book a free 30-minute strategy session through the Embiggen website: they are immediately asked questions on what innovation means to them and where they see a growth gap.
This dovetails with Embiggen’s belief that innovation is all about solving problems—the group only designs a venture after making sure there is a real need for it in the market. A venture graduates from this phase after a priority job-to-be-done that has high strategic value for the corporate partner is identified.
The second phase is ‘Venture’ design, where a full venture is designed complete with the value proposition, customer segments, key backend structures, the initial cost structure, and the potential revenue model. This phase also includes assumptions mapping which includes deal-breakers, which will be prioritized and tested in the following phase.
Phase three is known as ‘Incubation’, which involves Rapid Low-Cost Learning (RLCL) and Minimum Viable Testing (MVT). During RLCLs and MVTs, every single assumption is tested cheaply and quickly before even a single line of code is written. The results from these tests then create the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) of a venture, which is then used to get market feedback as quickly as possible.
In the third phase, metrics to be tracked include customer validation, solution feasibility, customer adoption, and issue resolution. A venture completes this phase once it has successfully resolved any deal-breaking assumptions and experienced increasing adoption of its business model and product in the pilot market.
“Our Incubation phase actually follows the lean startup methodology where repeated failure and iteration are important,” said Garcia. “By ‘failing’ early in the venture building process, it allows the team to repeatedly iterate and improve a product and correct its course early and cheaply—eventually allowing us to scale efficiently.”
Everything that Embiggen learns from testing its MVP goes into the fourth and final phase: Acceleration. During Acceleration, a dedicated venture team aims to achieve a final product fit for the market. These products usually have a financial metric of US$1 million in annual recurring revenue. It’s also at this point where Embiggen measures revenue, pipeline value, margin improvement, and earnings growth.
Garcia freely admits no venture really ever graduates from the Acceleration phase. “Instead, we always strive for constant improvement in terms of revenue and efficiency,” he adds.
Why ventures are worth it
However, despite the meticulous, detailed approach Embiggen takes to building a venture some remain unconvinced their services are needed.
According to Garcia, among some of Embiggen’s challenges is convincing CEOs and their boards that their company needs to innovate in the first place. “In many emerging markets, most corporations are stuck on the first horizon of innovation which is all about improving the core business. It is difficult to convince large conglomerates to innovate beyond that,” shared Garcia. “They feel like they’ll be the dominant player in the market forever, and as such don’t need to innovate. What they often don’t realize is that this won’t always be the case: a crisis could pop out of nowhere and a business can be rendered obsolete overnight.”
Fortunately, Embiggen has ways to convince skeptics of any corporation. For example, the venture model’s partnership model minimizes friction with its partners’ core business operations by serving as an outsourced innovation unit that reports directly to the CEO. This allows Embiggen to operate with agility and without bureaucratic hindrances, from ideation to scale.
Yet Embiggen’s work also remains ‘semi-autonomous’ since the venture builder still collaborates with key individuals from the partner’s core business to leverage their strengths in scaling. However, partners understand from the venture builder moves at startup speed, which they appreciate since it’s not typically their approach.
There is also a point when the benefits of working with Embiggen cannot be denied. Aside from flexibility, Embiggen’s emphasis on learning from failure and problem-solving ensures all its ventures will be relevant and possess market viability. Because venture building also requires a company to be attentive to changes in the market to continue improving its innovation, companies working with Embiggen learn to spot trends and new opportunities. Finally, by sharing risks with their corporate partners, Embiggen incentivizes their team to innovate efficiently and effectively, thereby de-risking the venture building process.
Expanding horizons
With a slew of partnerships and awards already under its belt, there is no denying that Embiggen has great potential. As for future projects, Garcia even shares that they are currently working on verticals such as micro-mobility and last-mile logistics for an uncaptured market, consumer health tech, and professional service marketplaces. Garcia even anticipates that the venture they are currently building with one of the largest Filipino insurance companies (the details of which will remain under wraps for now) might just be their most successful venture yet.
Embiggen’s ambitions don’t stop in the Philippines either. “We’re looking forward to expanding internationally, beyond emerging markets,” said Garcia. “We have taken our first few steps to achieve this goal. Last year, we incorporated Embiggen in the US. We currently have teams currently operating in Spain and the US. We also have deep industry connections across the world, including experts in Europe, South America, and the Middle East as we prepare to explore markets in ASEAN and the EU.”
In conclusion, Embiggen’s methodical and innovative approach to venture building offers corporations unprecedented levels of flexibility and expertise. By leveraging their team’s own experience in innovation and working hard to de-risk the venture building process, Embiggen shows corporations the way to staying competitive in an increasingly cutthroat market.
Embiggen shows it is possible to have the best of both worlds—corporations and startups—by creating a hybrid approach that combines the strengths of both.