The Unicorn Within: How Companies Can Create Game-Changing Ventures at Startup Speed

Look this is a great, very overlooked book from someone who has studied with Ash Maurya, Bill Aulet and Steven Gary Blank. You have an incredible book. This is a very overlooked book probably done as an marketing initiative and treated as such by reviewers. READ IT. Amazon has purchase limits.

Every company wants to grow; but once they get big, very few seem to be able to get out of their own way to recapture what it took to build that growth engine again. Despite the fact they sit on exactly the kind of strategically valuable assets most startups crave - existing customers, respected brands, supply chains, talented people, technology, market reach, etc. - the unfortunate truth is they too often do just that: sit on them. Their understandable focus on execution of today's business gets in the way of the equally vital imperative of exploring and experimenting to find tomorrow's.This book offers hope, and better yet, a specific, practical playbook you and your company can put to work now to "get growing" again. It condenses hard lessons learned through decades of successful engagements Yates and her colleagues have had helping big companies across many industries unleash their own growth potential.If you run a large company, I suggest you read this book. Then share it with your executive team, your board and your employees. If you work in a large company, buy it and start your own growth initiative with your like-minded colleagues. And then get to work, hopefully before some pesky startup beats you to it - just like they've done to too many of your predecessors who waited too long to unlock their own unicorn within.

Very rich with examples and analysis of successful ventures. A great step by-step guide for procedurally supporting the creating and incubation of ideas that may become powerful startups. This book helped me start my company and is also just a fascinating read!

My first impression is the strong form and presentation of the book . . . an inviting & accessible hybrid between a textbook and an enticing coffee table book. Then you read the Intro . . . it is truly ENERGIZING!!! While Linda Yates is the author, I gather it is more of a collaboration from a number of (pretty impressive) contributors at her firm, Mach48. Regardless, "They" ignite the Call to Action for most all constituents within larger organizations to get off their a%$es, leverage their many inherit advantages, and fully embrace their pursuit for their startup Unicorn(s)!! It is a pretty compelling read. All of this presented though a "We cannot afford NOT to!" lens.I hope this book receives the acclaim and traction it deserves. Should be a B-School course & curriculum in of itself!

I just finished reading The Unicorn Within, an excellent book by Linda Yates that provides a step-by-step guide for companies looking to launch new internal ventures and create their own venture factories. The book is chock-full of practical advice, frameworks, step-by-step guides, tool recommendations, and templates. While the book focuses on launching corporate new ventures, I found many parts of it to be applicable to any venture studio, accelerator, and even to individual startups. Highly recommended!

Seems like digital transformation for big companies should be a no brainer, right? It turns out that only 30% of those projects turn out successfully. This reality and many more observations and solutions presented here are important lessons for any CEO.

dollars were lost, and thousands of careers have been limited due to the inability for existing companies to launch new ventures. With this track record it is little wonder that existing companies are seen as unable to compete with disruptive start-ups.The Unicorn Within addresses this dismal success rate by laying out a proven set of practices and actions that have demonstrated success. Linda Yates and the team at Mach 49 are in the business of advising companies on how to launch successful and innovative startups.The Unicorn Within addresses the fundamental observation that. “if done properly, corporate ventures should have a higher success rate than their independent counterparts. Their destiny is to succeed, not fail – and the only reason for their high mortality rate is a failure of execution.”Addressing the FAILURE of EXECUTION with proven, structured, practical actions, tools and process is the focus of this book. This focus makes The Unicorn Within at least as important to corporate development, venturing or accelerators as Eric Reiss’s “The Lean Start-up” was to venture backed firms.This book is highly recommended for people in companies that need to radically innovate and launch new ventures or lines of business to grow revenue and be successful. This can include CEO’s, Heads of Corporate Development, Corporate Strategy, Head of Venturing, and those creating the ventures themselves. This is a must read and must follow for them.StrengthsThe book is based on reality and the real experience working within corporate venturing – particularly the relationship and connections with the ‘mothership.’The book is organized around a venturing process and contains tons of tools, examples and templates that give the venture team a leg up on how to do their jobs and what good work looks like.The book has a strong sense of what it is and how it creates value – this is a PRACTIONERS book not a strategy or consulting book that admires the problem. If you are thinking about participating or reconstituting a corporate venture group, then this book is a have, read and followChallengesWith all this detail and practicality, the book has limited examples or case studies. These would have been helpful at illustrating what good looks like, but there is more than enough detail here for you to know what to do.The book’s landscape layout, makes it a perfect mate to similar books like Osterwalder’s Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers (The Strategyzer series) or Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want (The Strategyzer Series) . The Unicorn Within is the practical approach to using these and similar tools. But making them in the same layout makes it difficult to use when you are not sitting at a desk or worktable. A small but real issue.OVERALL: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED for companies that want to or have tried and failed at creating or launching new companies.

The book has useful content but, reads like a dump of knowledge and supposed expertise gathered from what is described as Silicon Valley glitterati.It's good to have generally well-known and well-documented concepts in one book, but it doesn't connect the methodology pieces coherently where the output of one step can be connected to the input of the next. The physical book also falls apart after a few weeks!As a result, the book feels like an MVP and perhaps a full workable version will be released in the future.