In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, the intersection of AI and new venture creation represents a transformative opportunity for large companies. However, vetting and validating AI ideas can be complex and resource-intensive. Venture building provides corporations with a powerful model for turning high-potential ideas into successful products or startups at an unprecedented velocity. By adopting PSL’s proven process of ideation, validation, creation, and spinout, corporate leaders across product, venture, and innovation can de-risk AI initiatives and investments, bringing scalable innovations and brand-new, standalone venture-scale companies to market faster.

Embracing AI and Venture Building: A Tektronix Case Study

Fortive company, Tektronix, has been designing and manufacturing test and measurement equipment including oscilloscopes, logic analyzers and signal generators for multiple industries such as telecommunications, electronics and aerospace for more than 75 years. Tektronix has been working with PSL as part of the Fortive corporate innovation partnership, looking to identify and build new innovative solutions that support their engineers, scientists and customers in troubleshooting, monitoring and designing electronic systems. 

‍The innovation studio’s AI-focused model helped prove out promising ideas that have become valuable product features, and even created a new stand-alone company; the newly launched Glue Studio. Walk through the Tektronix and Glue Studio journey, building one of the first AI solutions designed for the industrial testing industry.

‍“Revolutionize product testing and accelerate quality product delivery with cutting edge automated test software.”

Step 1: Ideation and Sprint Week - Unlocking Opportunities with Tektronix Experts

PSL's ideation approach focuses on identifying challenges that AI can address. In collaboration with PSL, Tektronix brought diverse teams across product, sales and engineering together to identify pain points in electronic systems design that could be solved with AI-driven solutions. This phase wasn't just about brainstorming; it was about targeted ideation - finding problems worth solving and assessing AI’s feasibility to address them.

• Identifying Key Problems from Tektronix customers: AI solutions are only as good as the problems they solve. PSL helps teams hone in on specific challenges across process and productivity that AI can address, focusing on the scalability and uniqueness of each opportunity. Corporate leaders like Tektronix are the best “voice of the customer” - knowing what the biggest problems are and finding solutions that not only benefit their customers, but their core business and the industry as a whole.‍
• AI Potential Analysis: Each idea is quickly analyzed using the latest AI capabilities to determine its feasibility. PSL brings together industry and AI experts to assess requirements and potential roadblocks at an early stage.

Step 2: Validation - De-risking Ideas & Experimenting Quickly

Once promising ideas were generated, the focus shifted to rapid validation using a “Customer - Value Prop - Feature Set - Business Model” CVFB method, another PSL process. PSL worked with Tektronix to test core assumptions at high velocity using market surveys, prototype demos, and hypothesis testing. 

This data-driven process helped identify which ideas had a genuine market fit, ensuring that only scalable and viable concepts moved forward. 

• Hypothesis Testing: PSL applies rigor to rapidly test hypotheses for customer/market fit and conducting deep industry/competitive analysis. Each concept is tested for market interest, technical viability, and scalability.
• Customer Discovery: PSL’s validation approach includes direct engagement with potential users including Tektronix customers to understand their pain points and gauge interest, and ability and willingness to pay for a great solution. Tektronix took advantage of PSL’s experience to identify true product-market fit before investing heavily in development.
• Data-Driven Go/No-Go Decisions: PSL employs clear metrics to determine whether an idea should proceed to the next stage or be abandoned. Unlike typical internal teams, we killed lots of ideas which allowed Tektronix to avoid sunk costs and ensured only the strongest AI ideas move forward. ‍
• Securing early customers: During this process of speaking to Tektronix and other ideal customers, we also found customers for Glue Studio. Further confirming both willingness to play and pay which gave us more data points and greater confidence to move to the next step.

Step 3: Creation - From Idea to MVP

After validation, PSL and Tektronix moved to the “creation” phase of the PSL process for Glue Studio, using PSL’s startup-building mindset to bring the concept to life. The emphasis was on building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) quickly - ensuring feedback and iteration happened fast. PSL’s culture of agility fostered a startup-like environment within Tektronix, allowing for rapid iteration essential to bringing AI innovations to life.

• Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Development: PSL’s lean development methodology emphasizes getting an MVP into users' hands as quickly as possible. This allows for immediate feedback, iteration, and improvement, reducing time-to-market significantly. PSL and the Tektronix team continued to collaborate with early-adopter customers.
• Startup Culture within Corporate Boundaries: PSL introduces startup culture into the creation phase, fostering creativity, resilience, and nimbleness. This is particularly important for a standalone AI company that require frequent experimentation and adaptation.‍
• Cross-functional Teams: PSL combines AI engineers, product managers, and designers in small, autonomous teams dedicated to building the MVP. Tektronix leveraged PSL’s resources and expertise to ensure the right skills are in place from the beginning. At this stage, we also identify a CEO from our massive network of Entrepreneurs in Residence or in Glue Studio’s case, a corporate leader like David Sulpy who is a strong fit based on experience and expertise.

Step 4: Spin-Out - Launching New Ventures

The journey culminated in spinning out validated concepts into Glue Studio. This spin-out strategy enabled Tektronix to de-risk its innovation initiatives while giving AI solutions the focus needed to scale. With PSL’s support, new ventures emerged, backed by the expertise and operational foundation necessary to thrive.

• Creating Standalone Ventures: PSL works on building the operational backbone to spin it out. This includes recruiting the core leadership team, raising venture funding, and positioning the new business for rapid growth.‍
• Venture-Backed Scalability: Spinning out an AI project like Glue Studio into an independent company allows it to access venture funding to scale more aggressively than they might within a corporate structure.

Why Venture Building with PSL Works

1. Optionality: Venture building opens up a new path for innovation and growth with the choice to spin out to realize more value and capital or decide if solution is strategic for internal use only. After building a solution, Fortive has made the decision to spin in companies that made more sense to be integrated into core business operations.
2. Speed to Market: Time is a critical factor in innovation. Traditional corporate development cycles can take years, whereas venture builders can go from concept to launch in months. Venture building firms like PSL can help corporate partners rapidly test, refine, and launch new business ideas with speed that internal teams often can’t match​. By leveraging this speed, corporate leaders can seize market opportunities before competitors. PSL built and launched TeamSense with Fortive in less than 3 months from idea to spinout with paying customers.
3. Reduced Risk: Every new business venture carries risk, but venture builders mitigate this by applying a “fail fast” methodology. By partnering with external experts, corporations can experiment without overcommitting resources. Venture builders provide the agility to pivot or halt projects before significant investments are made​. PSL has an extremely high “kill rate” (we kill 9/10 ideas) on ideas that don’t meet market potential. 
4. Access to Top Talent and Technologies: Venture builders attract some of the best entrepreneurial minds and emerging technologies across machine learning, AI, and cloud computing​. Corporations can tap into these cutting-edge capabilities across design, engineering, product and venture investing without the challenges of recruiting and  onboarding specialized talent themselves. Fortive has been able to hire top venture building talent and CEO’s based on their work with PSL.
5. External Perspective and Entrepreneurial Expertise: This is especially beneficial for corporations seeking to break into new markets or industries where they have less internal expertise​. External partners like PSL bring an entrepreneurial mindset, fostering creativity and new business models, that will support Fortive’s new AI-based ventures.

The Urgency: Why Now?

Market Disruption is Accelerating
The pace of AI disruption is moving faster than ever and corporations are increasingly being outpaced by agile startups. To stay relevant, companies must innovate not only incrementally but transformatively. Venture building with external partners like PSL offers an unparalleled opportunity as another growth engine to supercharge startup investing, innovation R&D and product development. It’s fast, it reduces risk, and it gives companies access to both the talent and technologies they need to stay competitive.

Reach out to learn more corporate@psl.com!

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