Memo for Tomorrow ·
The Business of Tomorrow
The shift, in one line
Every established company runs two businesses: the one that pays today's bills, and the one that will have to pay tomorrow's. The business of tomorrow will not arrive as a plan. It will be found.
Hardy · 5 min read
Every established company runs two businesses: the one that pays today's bills, and the one that will have to pay tomorrow's. Most only invest in the first.
Every established company is good at something. It has learned, over decades, how to make, sell and deliver what its customers want, a little better each year. That knowledge is precious. It is also built for a world that is quietly moving.
The business of today is run on known questions: how to sell more, spend less and serve better. The business of tomorrow starts with questions nobody can answer yet. What will our customers need when their world changes? What can we offer that nobody else can? What should we stop doing?
This essay is about the second business: why it matters, what it takes to build, and why the time to start is now.
Why the business of tomorrow
Four forces are reshaping the ground that established companies won on.
- AI is changing what work costs, what customers expect, and how quickly a newcomer can catch up. A capability that took a decade to build can now be copied in a year.
- Energy and climate are changing what things cost to make and move, and what customers, lenders and regulators will accept.
- Geopolitics is redrawing supply chains and trade routes. Markets that felt permanent are now negotiable.
- Demographics are changing who works, who buys, and who pays for whom, in ageing markets and young ones alike.
None of these forces is new. What is new is that they are arriving together, and faster than most planning cycles. For a company built on the old ground, the honest questions are uncomfortable. Do we still have a right to play? What must we become? And how do we build something new when the skills to do it were never part of the job?
Why discovery is a capability, not a project
When the ground shifts, the first instinct is to commission a study. A consultancy maps the trends, ranks the opportunities and recommends three bets. The report is often good. It is also out of date by the time the board reads it, and it rarely tells you what customers will actually do.
The business of tomorrow can't be planned into existence. It has to be discovered: by finding problems worth solving, testing answers cheaply with real customers, and keeping only what earns its place. That is not a one-off exercise. It is a skill, and like any skill, it gets better with practice and fades without it.
A company with this capability can answer a new question in weeks rather than years. A company without it has two options when something changes: guess, or wait until someone else has proved the answer. Neither is a strategy.
Why venture building is how you invest in it
There are other ways to reach for growth. Acquisitions buy proven businesses, at proven prices. Corporate venture funds buy minority stakes in other people's ideas. Both have their place. Neither builds the company's own ability to discover.
Venture building does. It takes a problem, a small team and a disciplined process, and turns them into a new business the company owns. And it lets an established company play its strongest hand: the assets no startup can copy. Customers who already trust you. Data nobody else has. Licences, land, networks and know-how built over decades.
Most companies are sitting on these assets without using them. In McKinsey's 2024 survey of business leaders, around 90% said their organization had at least one underused asset with commercial potential, most often data or intellectual property (McKinsey). The same survey found that companies putting at least a fifth of their growth capital into new ventures reported organic growth about two percentage points higher than those putting in none.
That is the real case for venture building. Not one lucky venture, but a company that keeps getting better at finding its next business.
At the very least, have access to it
Not every company is ready to build a venture studio. Many shouldn't, yet because they underestimate what this requires. But every company needs access to the capability, because the questions will arrive whether or not it is ready to answer them.
There are three ways in.
Route | What you get | Best when |
|---|---|---|
Build | Your own team, method and governance; the capability stays in the company | You expect a steady flow of new questions and want to own the answer |
Partner | An experienced builder works alongside your people on a few ventures, and leaves the method behind | You want results soon and want to learn while doing |
Borrow | Specialists on call for a specific question: a diagnostic, a validation, a single venture case | You are not yet sure the capability is worth building |
The routes are not fixed. Many companies start by borrowing, move to partnering, and build once they have seen it work. The only route that doesn't work is having none. And the entry cost is lower than most boards assume: in one industry survey, about two-thirds of corporate venture-building programmes aimed to spend under $1 million on each venture over its whole life (Global Venturing).
Why now
Three things make October 2026 the moment to start, rather than next year.
The core is getting harder to grow. The IMF's latest outlook, published this month, expects global growth to slow to 3.1% in 2026, with oil assumed to average about $96 a barrel, more than 40% above last year, and inflation rising to 4.7%. It names geopolitical conflict, energy disruption and trade tensions as the risks to watch (Eurometal, on the IMF outlook). In that climate, squeezing more out of the existing business gets harder every quarter. Growth will have to come from somewhere new.
Discovery has never been cheaper. AI now lets a small team build, test and learn in weeks what used to take a department months. Venture builders themselves expect AI to make validating ideas faster and cheaper (Global Venturing). The cost of asking a question, and getting a real answer, has fallen sharply.
The gap is opening now. In September, Gartner reported that only 22% of companies had scaled AI across more than one business unit (Gartner). The companies that learn to discover and build in the next two years will set the pace for the decade. The rest will be buying from them.
Waiting feels prudent. In a period like this, it is the riskier choice.
Two businesses, one company
The business of today deserves every bit of care it gets. It pays for everything else. But it cannot be the only business a company invests in, because the world it was built for is changing faster than it can adapt on its own.
The business of tomorrow will not arrive as a plan. It will be found, one tested question at a time, by companies that have learned how to look. Build that capability, partner for it, or borrow it. Just don't be without it.
The question I'd like to leave you with: if your market changed next year, who in your company would know how to find what comes next?
Best,
Hardy.