Summary:
In the corridors of many Nordic and European boardrooms, a quiet tragedy is playing out. For over 15 years, industrial giants have streamlined, optimized, and fine-tuned their operations in the pursuit of efficiency. They’ve mastered the art of operating—but forgotten the discipline of building. In the process, they’ve raised a generation of executives who excel at performance management, but have been starved of the opportunity—or the mandate—to create new businesses.
This is more than a leadership culture problem. It is an economic risk. According to Shift Actions' analysis, Finland alone loses €3 billion in economic value every year due to large-cap companies systematically underinvesting in adjacent and transformational innovation. Instead of allocating capital to build the industries of tomorrow, companies remain tightly tethered to their core businesses, extracting value while intangible capital—ideas, patents, capabilities, and human ingenuity—languishes unused.
Before the 2008 financial crisis, innovation and venturing within corporates were still viable career paths. But as crisis hit, the instinct was survival. Executives battened down the hatches and focused on cutting costs. The priority? OPEX optimization. The result? A new corporate orthodoxy that privileged predictability over experimentation.
That strategy worked—until it didn’t. Over time, the focus on operating efficiency became not just dominant, but exclusive. Corporate leadership pipelines, MBA curricula, and performance incentive structures converged around maximizing return on capital within existing business models. Business building—the art of creating something entirely new—was pushed to the fringes.
In Nordic industry, this shift has had outsized consequences. ETLA, Finland’s Economic Research Institute, reports that the country has suffered two decades of flat productivity growth. Meanwhile, data compiled by Shift Actions shows that only 2% of Nordic industrial companies have successfully scaled outside their core business. In the United States, the figure is 17%.
Where did the builders go?
Across Europe, a generation of high-potential leaders has been raised in corporate environments where new ventures are considered too risky or too disconnected from quarterly KPIs. These leaders may have never worked in a growth-stage venture, never had P&L responsibility for an innovation initiative, and never been tasked with designing a go-to-market for a completely new product or market.
This lack of exposure creates a blind spot—not just in skills, but in mindset. Strategic courage is replaced with strategic compliance. When new ideas do emerge, they struggle to survive: there’s no budget line, no clear owner, and no organizational mandate to explore them. Some are parked in research, some circulate in PowerPoint form for years, and most fade into oblivion.
As a result, a generation of talent has missed out on the kind of entrepreneurial apprenticeship that turns operators into builders. This is not an individual failure, but a structural one—driven by systems that favor core exploitation over new value creation.
This obsession with meeting minimum future compliance—be it around sustainability, AI-readiness, or digital transformation—has led many firms to mistake survival for strategy. Instead of rethinking what the company could become, leadership teams optimize for what it already is.
The consequence is not just stagnant growth—it is systemic underperformance. Finland’s industrial economy alone is leaking billions in value annually, not because ideas are scarce, but because the machinery to act on them is missing.
Shift Actions estimates that if even a fraction of the unrealized intangible capital held by large Nordic firms were activated through structured venturing mechanisms, the economic uplift would be immense. We're not talking about hobbyist innovation here—but repeatable, de-risked, and capex-aligned business building.
To change this trajectory, companies need to move from risk avoidance to risk structuring. That’s where Corporate Venture Studios (CVS) come in.
Unlike traditional corporate innovation programs—which often fall prey to "innovation theater"—venture studios build new ventures with speed, focus, and structural separation. Studios operate with dedicated teams, clear governance, external funding channels, and a disciplined venture-building methodology.
This isn’t outsourcing innovation. It’s creating a parallel track for bold ideas to become investable businesses, backed by the brand, assets, and expertise of the parent company—but with the independence required to truly scale.
Most importantly, studios unlock dormant intangible capital—patents, capabilities, know-how—that would otherwise sit idle. In doing so, they create new growth engines without disrupting the core. And the returns can be extraordinary: data shows that successful venture studios deliver TVPI multiples of 5–9x and IRRs around 60%, far outpacing corporate venture capital or internal R&D spinouts.
If companies don’t act, the losses will compound. Europe risks entrenching a dual economy—one with thriving tech scaleups and another with legacy industrials stuck in late-cycle operational efficiency.
Even worse, we risk institutionalizing a generation of leaders who have never built, only optimized. Without intentional exposure to business creation, the capability gap will widen further. Leadership succession plans will prioritize risk-averse operators, and the innovation muscle will atrophy beyond repair.
In short: the future will belong to those who can build it. And currently, many corporates no longer can.
The good news? This problem is solvable. Venture studios offer a pragmatic, structurally courageous response to decades of missed opportunity. They allow companies to:
Activate idle intangible capital
Test and scale adjacent ventures without derailing the core
Develop the next generation of entrepreneurial leaders
Attract co-investors and public innovation funding (e.g., Business Finland, EU programs)
Create optionality for future spinouts or re-integration
In an era where new business creation is the most underdeveloped corporate capability, venture studios may well be the most important tool in a CEO’s transformation arsenal.
Executives, ask yourself:
What ideas have we abandoned—not because they were bad, but because we had no structure to pursue them?
What value sits idle in our IP, our people, our technologies? Do you even know?
Who in our organization still knows how to build?
At Shift Actions, we help leading industrials build that missing structure. If you're ready to activate your next wave of growth—not through compliance, but through courage—let's talk.