Get Serious About Growth – with Advocates

If you're in charge of corporate disruptive growth or building new ventures, you've probably come across the term "Growth Advocate". But what does it mean, and why is it important?

In our work assisting large global businesses in establishing new ventures and partnerships, we know that the toughest part of corporate venturing is managing the organization. We lovingly call it “the mothership”. Inside the mothership, we’ve identified an essential role that can speed up progress in Corporate Venture Building: the Growth Advocate. These folks are not part of the venture team – yet they’ve been given both the opportunity and the authority to provide new ventures access to corporate assets and capabilities.

Without Growth Advocates (and an agreed process for accessing them), ventures often face obstacles when trying to leverage corporate capabilities. Legal takes too long on contracts, IT can't prioritize integration projects, and business units won't allocate resources. The main company starts to feel like a hindrance. Whereas many corporate projects do succeed - due to individual passion, energy, good internal connections, and of course individual senior leadership support - without a coherent process it’s simply not scalable.

The Growth Advocate acts as a flexible, scalable, integration layer — a human API — between startups and corporate functions, business units and assets. With clear rules of engagement, they expedite access to assets like data, distribution channels, manufacturing, customers and brands.

What sets Growth Advocates apart is their ongoing responsibility and incentives to support ventures (and other growth projects). They have boundaries, service level agreements, and succession plans. Leadership acknowledges and communicates the value of the role, and its relevance to corporate growth strategies, and rewards accordingly.

We identify Growth Advocates early from functions like:

- Sales to test distribution or customer desirability

- Marketing to allocate budget

- HR / Legal to hire / contract quickly

- IT to integrate solutions

- Data / Insights to share analytics

With an appropriate Growth Advocate in each relevant area, ventures simply move faster. They get the main company advantage without the heavy bureaucracy.

Introducing Growth Advocates signals a serious commitment from the top down. It needs investment, incremental process adjustment, and alignment of incentives. But, when done right, it can constructively unlock the full potential of corporate assets when applied to new corporate venture initiatives. Going forward this key role can apply to optimizing strategic partnerships, M&A and even commercial agreements with investment portfolio companies. Instead of one-off "Innovation Theatre”, Growth Advocates make repeatable, scalable venture building and corporate innovation possible. They are the human interface for turning ideas into concrete businesses leveraging advantages that only the ‘mothership’ can provide.