Did you know that the chance to create a profitable business earning more than $50 million in annual recurring revenue from a newly launched corporate start-up is 3%*? In other words, only 1 out of 30 businesses makes it. That’s why streamlining business incubation and becoming best-in-class at the fine art of corporate venture building has been a key focus at Nexwave, the Amadeus Business Incubator.
The role of Nexwave within Amadeus
At Nexwave, our role is to assess these trends, and to identify, incubate, and grow business ideas that will have a transformational impact on the travel experience of today and tomorrow.
In my role as Head of the Incubation Office for Nexwave, I’m constantly looking for ways to improve our incubation process: how can we test, build, and launch ideas to market faster and more successful than before? And how can we best support and provide a competitive edge to the businesses in our incubator, how can we help them grow and scale?
For a number of years, we have been using “the Lean Startup methodology” to design and validate solutions, by identifying areas of the travel journey where travelers experience the most pain points.
Yet, we’ve learned that “Lean Startup” is really designed for greenfield start-ups and is not adapted to some key aspects of building businesses in a corporate context, which is the case of Nexwave. Therefore, we have taken the key principles of the Lean Startup framework — Build-Measure-Learn— to the next level, by rolling out a new methodology called “The Lean Scaleup™”. By doing so, we are ensuring that all the conditionsare met for validated businesses to successfully transition from Nexwave, our incubation department to an Amadeus business unit.
The key principles of a best-in-class corporate incubation methodology
New ideas are exciting, but to the untrained eye, what makes a “good idea” may be subjective. And once you’ve found a “good idea”, the hard part still remains: transforming it from a highly uncertain concept into a concrete and validated business model with a clear plan to scale.
Our new Business Building Toolbox aims to provide clear steps for action, easy to understand deliverables and objective measures of success.
We replaced innovation jargon with clear, concise human language to ease the communication with the rest of the organization and to foster engagement and adoption. We no longer use terms like “Search for problem/solution-fit or product/market-fit” but instead we speak about business foundation, business strategy or business design.
In addition, each business is defined by different levels of maturity, and each maturity level has defined quantitative and qualitative deliverables, to help judge and assess the progress throughout the incubation journey. This paves a clear path for all our incubation businesses to follow, so that key stakeholders know exactly how our portfolio is performing and where to invest.
Nexwave businesses launched with success
Thanks to our increased ability to validate and to scale businesses opportunities, Nexwave has become an important incubator for new businesses in the travel technology space.
Some recent examples includeAmadeus Hey!
, a digital travel assistant that provides personalized and contextualized travel services and is already servicing about 200,000 trips per month;Amadeus Discover
, a platform to discover and book activities and restaurants at destination already distributed in 2000 hotels; andTraveler ID
, a solution that digitalizes and verifies travel documents and that has already verified 23 million documents since its launch in 2021!
François Blanc, Director of Traveler ID, says:
“We pivoted Traveler ID during the pandemic to offer a solution that verifies health documents at check-in. In 2022, COVID-19 restrictions started to ramp down and this new incubation methodology helped us develop a new passport verification module quickly. It also helped us identify and work with the right Amadeus teams to accelerate the development and go-to-market of our product!”
There is more to come in our incubation journey. We are constantly exploring the next generation of Amadeus businesses. In 2022, two new business opportunities passed the Business Foundation stage in the areas of sustainability and next generation mobility and we are just kicking-off the Opportunity Discovery phase for new topics. More on this soon.
In the meantime,learn more about Nexwave, our portfolio of businesses and how we are continuously strengthening our best-in-class business incubation framework.
*https://www.leanscaleup.com/blog/how-to-get-pre-scaling-validation-right/
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