$50bn Fortune 500 and L Marks Intrapreneurship Programme

For the past 4 years, L Marks has worked with a Fortune 500 strategic investment company, delivering a global Intra-Lab. The corporation operates globally with 113 locations in overseas countries/regions with revenues of ~$50bn annually. The Intra-Lab has operated across both developed and emerging markets, spanning key industries including Finance, IT, Infrastructure, Energy, Metals and Agriculture amongst others.

The vision for this L Marks Intra-Lab programme has been to identify, champion and launch revolutionary new business ideas and find ways to imbed an innovation culture throughout the organisation.

“The programme was a great place to validate the idea, and use a data-centric approach to mitigate risks. We even pivoted our idea to fit the market better with the L Marks approach of building new business.”
– Team Leader from Africa

As the programme has evolved over the years, our client has been able to achieve their goals of:

Giving employees an entrepreneurial toolbox and learning experiences.
A growing portfolio of new and innovative business cases generated by employees.
A thriving culture of innovation, collaboration and inclusivity across the organisation.

The programme has allowed over ~90 employees to develop new business opportunities and collaborate with their colleagues across borders. L Marks actively supported these employees through a structured approach that supported the team with university-grade learning content, masterclass workshops from our partners at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School, day-to-day support and training; in addition to mentorship from external experts and internal leaders.

“The intrapreneurship programme gave me the opportunity to experience how to develop a new business from scratch with the deep insights from colleagues as well as outside mentors and advisors.”
– Team Leader from Europe

During the programme, senior leadership and decision makers across the organisation and HQ were involved to steer the strategy of the programme, shortlist promising ideas and candidates, and provide valuable advice to support the teams to align their business opportunities with the organisation.

“The education materials were amazing. There were learnings we had from this programme that could be applied to our wider business in general.’’
– Team Leader from Europe

Benefits to our Corporate Partner:

Educate employees with university-grade learning content and build new skills and experiences.
Delivers an exciting and differentiated training programme that attracts and retains the best talent.
Faster ideation to implementation with a structured approach that bridges innovation to the core.
Elevates revenue growth through a continuous stream of new innovation.
Gives a voice to all employees to express their passion and ideas.
Breaks down organisational silos and promotes interconnectivity across functions.
Boosts your company’s competitive advantage and sustainability as an industry leader.

“It was a really good experience in accelerating an idea within the limited time – we shall apply this to our daily life to improve our efficiency in developing new projects. We personally and the company, have definitely benefited from our participation in programme.”
– Team Leader from Asia

Results

MANUFACTURING ECO-FRIENDLY PROTEIN FROM DRIED INSECTS

This venture produces a new insect protein feed as a sustainable alternative to soy and meat, where current farming methods are damaging to the environment. The team has positioned itself as a disruptor to the global animal feed industry which is valued at an extraordinary $500 billion in total.

During the programme, the team researched across the entire supply chain to build partnerships and produce an early-stage digital prototype mockup to test with customers, in addition to high-level financial modelling to determine the commercial viability.
L Marks then supported the team to put together a business model that would efficiently engage with the existing market players. At the end of the programme, this venture demonstrated interest from over 50% of the animal feed market in the country and received letters of intent from over 10 large customers in a short period.

Post-Programme: The project was successful at Demo Day and has since been adopted internally to roll out a pilot project and continue development. As a high-CAPEX project, the development of the large infrastructure is in the planning stages.

A blockchain platform to measure, manage and communicate carbon emissions

This venture is a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution which provides a transparent and trustworthy way to measure, manage and communicate carbon emissions across an organisation’s supply chain. L Marks guided the team through conceptualising, validating and scaling up the business model.

The team leverages financial information (arguably the most reliable information within an organisation) at specific key areas to establish a “Carbon Emissions Dashboard” (based on a standard emission calculation methodology) to get companies on the path to managing and sharing this information profitably. Not only does this solution keep different tiers of the organisation’s supply chain accountable, but also provides a way to map out inefficiencies that can be tackled.

Post-Programme: The client progressed the development of the venture for another year of ‘Venture Building’. The team rebranded and received seed capital from the corporation to scale the idea with partners and identified customers.

A platform to solve language learning for multilingual families

This concept was born from passionate employees wanting to develop a solution to solve language learning for multilingual families. In many families living in one location with parents originating from other countries, many languages can be confusing for children to learn concurrently.

Working with L Marks’, the team created a customer-centric business model, developed a digital prototype and implementation plan, tested with customers and engaged HQ decision-makers to explore internal investment for scaling up.Impressively, 80% of potential customers (B2C) interviewed showed a clear intent to use the online platform, in addition to 3 large organisations verifying their interest to implement with their employees (Undisclosed Fortune 500 company, Facebook, Trivago).

Post-Programme: The client progressed the development of this venture for another year of ‘Venture Building’. The Polyglo team did more user testing and built an MVP of their platform. At the end of the 2nd year, the project did not continue as it did not meet the investment requirements of the corporation.

Bringing Digital Healthcare to support disease management in Africa

This venture is a medical platform that L Marks and the client developed in Ghana which provides clinically validated and easy-to-access prevention and management solutions for NCDs, which would ultimately reduce the burden of Cardiovascular Disease, Diabetes and Obesity.
A huge unmet need in the country is access to Doctors. There are only 2 Doctors per 10,000 people, this is concerning compared to developed countries with 24 doctors per 10,000 people.

To meet this need, L Marks and the team validated the concept with patients; 84% of respondents would trust a digital platform for personalised medical advice. These insights among others allowed the team to build out a robust business model and implementation plan that was relevant for the local region and could be potentially scaled to neighbouring countries.

Post-Programme: The corporate leadership team allowed the team to develop a digital MVP and test it with patients in a real-world setting. After extensive testing, it was difficult to prove the commercial viability in terms of scalability and so the project was stopped until the local market was better understood.

Connecting farmers in Africa to the Voluntary Carbon Credit Market

This venture is a digital platform to incentivise the adoption of regenerative farming to provide higher-quality farming yields sustainably. These practices also generate carbon credits which can be sold to corporations to offset carbon emissions. In a market forecast to grow to $40 billion by 2030, this is a win-win solution to push sustainability goals as well as provide additional smallholder farmer incomes.

L Marks accelerated the team to make a huge amount of progress in 16 weeks. The team validated the concept with corporate customers and industry verification firms, continuously refining the business model to mix cash revenues with farming inputs to benefit the farmers and the client, identifying market risks such as price volatility and developing a pricing stabilisation plan to mitigate these macroeconomic risk factors.

Post-Programme: This venture progressed into the 2nd year Venture Build phase. Following another year of further development, the companies HQ has adopted the idea into their business units and has given a large undisclosed seed investment to start scaling up the concept with their corporate partners.

Creating environmental offshore reefs utilising decommissioned oil rigs

This venture is an infrastructure project that offers a sustainable, ecological and profitable alternative for the disposal of offshore platforms and structures.

The project has two revenue-generating opportunities. First, will focus on small-scale artificial reef creation and blue carbon credits generation. The second will be a large-scale ‘oil rig-to-reef’ decommissioning programme and marine habitat creation.
The team utilised the L Marks programme and guidance to make a huge amount of progress in a short time period by validating the concept with potential customers such as large petroleum corporations and state-owned oil companies. This allowed the team to map the business journey effectively to implement such a project. L Marks and the team continuously refined the business model and identified new key partnerships.

Post-Programme: This venture went onto further development for another year to finalise the business model and organise strategic partners for the new venture (including supermajor oil and gas companies). The client has now adopted the idea into their core business unit and has begun scaling up the concept with an injection of capital.

“It was my first time creating a new business with this start-up methodology, I learnt a lot and my leadership abilities were improved.”
– Team Leader from Middle East