What Is an R&D Venture Studio?
And Why Your Organization Needs One
Innovation programs are everywhere. Accelerators, pitch competitions, technology licensing offices, startup bootcamps—every research university, national laboratory, and R&D-driven corporation has them.
So why create something new?
Because the current system isn’t working. Hundreds of thousands of new products, new lines of business, and new startups get created every year, but most of them miss the mark. Meanwhile, the best opportunities never even get started at all! (See our first post in this series, The Hidden Iceberg of Innovation).
This isn’t anybody’s fault: it’s just that traditional innovation & entrepreneurship programs, even when well-resourced, were never designed to originate ventures. They are designed to support innovative projects after they’ve already been formed.
Enter the R&D venture studio: a new structure built from the ground up to generate new, world-changing startups from inside your R&D organization. It’s not about waiting for a startup to knock on your door. It’s about going into the lab, identifying overlooked technology and market needs, and proactively a new building venture around it.
So, what is an R&D venture studio?
A venture studio is a program that creates companies in-house. An R&D venture studio does this by embedding technical entrepreneurs inside research labs to explore high-impact commercial opportunities—and then helping build startups from the ground up.
Think of it as a venture origination engine, with several key features:
Venture Builders are hired full-time to work inside labs. They’re not mentors—they’re operators, often future founders.
Ideas get sourced systematically—by scouting technologies, identifying market gaps, and exploring potential combinations.
Startups are born inside the studio, not brought in from elsewhere in the organization.
Researchers stay focused on science, while the studio does the heavy lifting on market exploration and company formation.
Why is this model so effective?
It activates the latent potential of your R&D
Most research institutions only commercialize a small fraction of their inventions. An R&D venture studio expands the funnel by identifying overlooked ideas—and turning them into startups that wouldn’t exist otherwise.It bridges the cultural gap between research and entrepreneurship
Many researchers are open to commercial impact, but don’t know how to pursue it. Studios provide a trusted pathway, without requiring the PI to lead the entrepreneurial exploration.It replaces serendipity with process
Great startups shouldn’t require lucky hallway conversations to get started. Venture studios bring structure to what is otherwise a fragmented, ad hoc process.It creates better companies
By combining rigorous market discovery with defensible IP, studios produce ventures with both strong “tech push” and real “market pull.”
Why your institution needs one now
If you are a university, national lab, corporate R&D group, or mission-driven nonprofit, an R&D venture studio will:
Accelerate the rate of impactful spinouts
Increase the translational impact of your research portfolio
Attract new kinds of talent—technical entrepreneurs with translational ambition
Deepen relationships with funders and corporate partners
Demonstrate thought leadership in innovation
At MIT Proto Ventures, we’ve seen firsthand how transformative this model can be. Our portfolio includes companies in fusion diagnostics, satellite propulsion, and AI data center power supply. None of them came in through the front door. All of them were built from scratch, starting with an overlooked insight and a deliberate process.
The bottom line
If you're only supporting startups that already exist, you're missing 90% of the opportunity. An R&D venture studio changes that.
It’s time to move from supporting innovation to creating it.
Next in our series: “Venture Builders: The ⅓ Founder, ⅓ Scientist, ⅓ Investor DNA That Makes It Work.”