Gregor Gimmy on the history of venture clienting

How can companies systematically use start-ups? Gregor Gimmy tells the success story of venture clienting, from the beginnings at BMW to the global innovation strategy.

Regular readers of Startbase have long been familiar with Gregor Gimmy: in a two-part interview (Part 1 | Part 2) he gave deep insights into his work. Now the pioneer of Venture Clienting has published a detailed article on Medium in which he describes the definition and history of this concept.

The birth of venture clienting at BMW

As Gimmy explains, the term "venture clienting" did not exist before 2014. Companies had already been using start-up innovations in the past, but without a systematic approach. The concept was only officially coined at BMW in 2014. At that time, Gimmy developed a structured model that integrated startup products efficiently and scalably into existing company processes.

From the BMW Startup Garage to a global movement

With the founding of the BMW Startup Garage in 2015, the first dedicated Venture Client Unit was created. This transformed BMW's selective collaboration with startups into a professional corporate function. Other companies such as Bosch, Siemens and Airbus soon followed suit.

Academic recognition and global dissemination

In 2017, the first academic publication on venture clienting appeared in the Harvard Business Review. Since then, the topic has also been present at international business schools, for example in a case study by INSEAD. In 2024, the venture clienting model was included in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Innovation Practices - another milestone.

An outlook for the future

Today, hundreds of companies around the world use the term venture clienting. Numerous universities teach the model and consulting firms such as Deloitte offer specialized services. In his latest article, Gregor Gimmy provides a sound basis for better understanding the growing importance of venture clienting - and shows how it is shaping the future: What started at BMW is now shaping the innovation landscape globally.

In view of the rapid development in the field of venture clienting, we reacted early on in our start-up portal and were the first German-language start-up media to introduce a separate category for this. Venture clienting stands for a new growth approach for startups that is clearly distinct from previous models.

If you would like to delve deeper into the history of venture clienting, you can find Gregor Gimmy's full article here.