The corporate venture building glossary.
Venture building is full of words that have stopped meaning anything. These are the ones we use, defined the way we use them, each one argued properly in an essay or on a method page.
Terms
11 terms
- Belief extraction
Belief extraction is the practice of surfacing the specific, falsifiable claim about a market that a leadership team is actually betting on, before any roadmap is written. The belief must be one most of the industry would dispute, and testable enough to be proven wrong.
Essay: Belief Extraction: The Method Behind Every Limineer Engagement →- Conviction
Conviction in venture building is a specific claim about the world that could be proven wrong and that you are willing to stake something on. Certainty demands evidence before committing; conviction commits to a testable belief and then gathers evidence against it.
Essay: Conviction Over Certainty: The Real Starting Point for Corporate Ventures →- Corporate antibody response
The corporate antibody response is the pattern in which an organisation's own functions — procurement, IT security, legal, brand, finance — each behave exactly as designed for the core business and collectively starve a new venture of the speed it needs. Death by a thousand reasonable requests.
Essay: Corporate Antibodies: How Organisations Reject the Very Ventures They Commission →- Corporate venture building
Corporate venture building is the practice of creating a new business inside an established company — with its own team, model and P&L — rather than extending an existing product line. It targets where a market is going rather than where the company already is.
Essay: 7 Mistakes You're Making with Corporate Venture Building →- Distributed corporate innovation
Distributed corporate innovation is the structural shift of responsibility for building new businesses out of a central lab and into business units — where the sector P&L, the sharpest market signal, and now the mandate to act on it all sit in the same place.
Essay: Corporate Innovation Didn't Die. It Moved In With You. →- Innovation theater
Innovation theater is corporate activity that produces the visible signals of innovation — labs, hackathons, accelerators, innovation job titles — without changing how the organisation creates or captures value. It is not cynical, which is why it persists: the surrounding incentives make the performance rational.
Essay: Innovation Theater: Why Most Corporate Innovation Doesn't Innovate →- Liminal Process Model
The Liminal Process Model is Limineer’s proprietary method for taking a corporate conviction from liminal space to a launched venture. It moves in four phases — Liminal Space, Discovery, Design, Venture Build — and every phase ends in an explicit build/don’t-build call, so a wrong assumption dies in weeks instead of consuming a budget year.
The interactive walkthrough →- Liminal space
The liminal space is the threshold between what a business is and what its market is asking it to become — the zone of uncertainty where industry orthodoxies stop holding. Limineer treats it as the raw material of venture building: the ventures that define the next decade come from this space, not from the core.
Watch the model move →- New Business Opportunity (NBO)
A New Business Opportunity is a venture-shaped claim on a market: a contrarian belief, the causal logic that would make it true, and a route to economic value, held together tightly enough to be evaluated for investability. An NBO is what the Discovery phase produces and what the Design phase stress-tests — the unit of work between an idea and a company.
How an NBO becomes a venture →- Venture builder
A venture builder is a partner that creates new companies with a corporate rather than advising it: embedded operators who take a conviction through validation to a stand-alone venture, and share the execution risk. An innovation consultancy recommends what to do; a venture builder is accountable for what actually gets built.
Essay: Venture Builder or Innovation Consultancy? The Difference Is Who Carries the Risk →- Vetting sprint
A vetting sprint is a 4–12 week engagement that takes a leadership team’s strongest conviction about an emerging market and stress-tests it against real signals: customer discovery, competitive landscape, internal asset audit, and first-principles challenge. It ends in a build/don’t-build verdict backed by evidence, not a recommendation deck.
The sprint in detail →
See the words at work.
The guide puts this vocabulary into one process, from belief to company.