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Unicorn hunting often fails, and moonshots miss. There’s a better way—one grounded in incremental progress, partnerships, and practical paths to business model reinvention.
By Florian Noell, EMEA Startups, Scaleups, and Venturing Leader, Partner, PwC Germany
The takeaways
- A pragmatic approach to start-up collaboration drives innovation and business model reinvention.
- Hybrid engagement models with start-ups outperform risky moonshot investments and deliver faster impact.
- Companies can unlock value by partnering with, investing in, sourcing from, or even building start-ups with strategic fit.
All big, established companies face a contradiction. The business model and strategy that brought them success may eventually hold back reinvention efforts that keep them viable. This self-disruption paradox, explored in the work of the late author and academic Clayton Christensen,1 sees large and otherwise thriving organisations failing to disrupt their industry because they’re unable to first disrupt themselves.
Today, the pressure to disrupt—and reinvent—is rising as changing customer expectations meet, and are themselves shaped by, the confluence of AI, physical climate risk, and other megatrends. Together, these forces are blurring industry boundaries and putting huge amounts of value in motion. According to PwC’s research, an estimated US$7 trillion was up for grabs in 2025 alone from companies reinventing business models—that is, fundamentally transforming how they create, deliver, and capture value.
Nonetheless, the uncomfortable reality for big companies is that successful new business models usually originate in start-ups, which thrive on upending incumbents’ legacy value propositions, cost structures, and business models.
This naturally makes start-ups a competitive threat, though savvy executives also see them as valuable innovation partners. In the not-so-distant past, this collaboration often took the form of high-risk, high-reward venture capital, or so-called “moonshot” investing. These highly ambitious investments in projects or start-ups have the potential to revolutionise industries or generate massive returns—but they also carry a significant possibility of failure.
For large companies, moonshots can miss for several reasons: The venture sits too far from the core business to sustain ongoing focus or internal momentum. High investment needs burn cash too quickly. Progress simply stalls—and patience runs out—when the product or service is so novel that no clear market yet exists.
Some forward-looking incumbents are addressing these issues by adapting traditional approaches and shifting towards hybrid partnership models to harness start-up agility and innovation while playing to their own strengths.
These approaches may be less glamorous than shooting for the moon or hunting unicorns, but they’re proving successful as companies look to thrive in an era of industry convergence. Three approaches stand out: corporate venture capital (CVC), corporate venture building (CVB), and venture clienting.