Venture studios beyond the hype: Key challenges and a way forward

Venture studios, typically referred to as organizations that systematically build new ventures in partnership with external cofounders, are rapidly emerging as a new model of venture creation. Yet, venture studios rarely look alike. Amid growing hype, numerous players are seeking to brand themselves as venture studios, resulting in conceptual ambiguity and a lack of shared standards. This heterogeneity creates significant challenges for standardization and stakeholder alignment in assessing how these diverse models operate and how they differ from other established, venture-supporting organizations like incubators and accelerators. Drawing on a two-step research design—combining an archival analysis focused on eight globally recognized venture studios exemplars and a case study of 14 Italian studios—we decode the venture studio model and identify its core design choices, activities, and the key challenges driving its heterogeneity. Our findings revealed three main challenges: (1) the identity-less builder, in which venture studios struggle with an ambiguous mission as startup factories; (2) the phantom founder, in which misaligned incentives emerge following a spin-out; and (3) heterogenesis of ends, which reflects conflicting short- and long-term objectives. We conclude by proposing a set of guiding questions designed to support prospective external cofounders, venture studio investors, and follow-on venture investors in evaluating or engaging with venture studios, contributing to the development of shared mental models, and emerging best practices.