Words we mean precisely.
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.
- 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 →