Building Future Relevance: How Venture Labs Challenge the Companies That Fund Them

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For a family-owned audio company facing invisible competitors and overnight business model disruptions, that lie became untenable.

Sennheiser excelled at hardware quality and reliability. However, the hard truth arrived: their next competitor wasn't in their industry. It was creeping from behind, often invisible until too late.

Lab X, Sennheiser's venture building studio, was established to own Horizon 3 bets—the five-to-ten-year ideas that feel like distractions. Sofia Brazzola, Venture Lead at LabX, has built a model for how a small, mighty team inside a legacy hardware company challenges the status quo, ring-fences budgets for the unknown, and builds future relevance.

For decades, the company knew its competition intimately. They were locked in head-to-head battles with market leaders in professional audio. Recently, however, that clarity vanished.

This uncertainty stems from the S-curves of innovation. The company faced the end of a plateau in their core business. While incremental innovation could extend that curve by a few years, the realization hit hard: "No one was really taking care of the longer-term horizon." The Horizon 3 ideas—bets placed five years out—were being neglected because they felt like distractions to a company focused on quarterly efficiency.

This insight birthed the venture studio. The unit was not designed as a corporate accelerator or a broad innovation management team. It was built specifically as a venture building studio inside the Corporate Development Office. "That's what makes us maybe a little bit unique. We do have an influence on strategy."

In the audio industry, Artificial Intelligence is an existential shift. For a hardware company, the reality is clear: they are not going to build the next foundational model.

Instead, the approach treats AI as a disruption signal. Sofia frames the fundamental question: "Who must we become to stay relevant in a world where basically, audio will be shaped by AI?"

This perspective shifts the focus from technology to identity. It forces the organization to look at AI as a catalyst for new venture theses, not just as a tool for efficiency—though AI is used to tap into larger data sets and increase analytical power "multiple folds."

To manage the tension between long-term strategy and immediate action, the studio operates on a "dual engine setup." This structure divides focus evenly: 50% at the strategic level and 50% on hands-on operational venture sprints.

The first engine drives the identification of opportunity areas. This involves strategic futuring work to identify scenarios that are both preferable and probable five to ten years out. Spotting trends alone isn't enough; these must be translated into specific venture theses.

Once an opportunity area is selected, the second engine kicks in. The studio runs short, concise design sprints to validate specific ideas. This stage-gate process is rigorous, moving from a thesis to a prototype to validation of traction.

OriginAI serves as a prime example of this engine in action. Born out of foresighting work regarding trust in the media industry, the team identified a widening gap in deep fake detection. They ran sprints, understood the problem, and developed a prototype. Realizing they lacked the internal capabilities to scale it, they established a spin-off, hiring an entrepreneurial team to run it. "We gave them the freedom to explore because they have the right speed and mindset." The result was an independent startup that recently won a top Swiss startup award in the security category.

Despite the structured approach, the path to building future relevance is paved with friction. The challenge is familiar: "We do deliver sprints and decks and get people excited in the organization, but then often end up with validated concepts that go nowhere."

The reasons are familiar to any corporate innovator: lack of budget, fear of distraction, and a pervasive survival bias. The internal monologue of a legacy company is predictable: "If we always made it until now, why should we be disrupted tomorrow?"

When ideas are adjacent or incremental, they pass through the system easily. "Whenever ideas are disruptive and have the potential to cannibalize the core business, then we get into the hard discussions." Stakeholders look for short-term KPIs, and nobody wants to own a risky bet that doesn't pay off immediately.

Delivering prototypes isn't enough. To be successful, a venture lab needs the decision power to select which ideas to pursue.

Through the challenges of budget constraints and organizational denial, four hard-earned lessons emerge for operating a venture studio within a legacy enterprise.

Bold ideas only move if backed by power and protection. Driving Horizon 3 innovation requires a "ring-fenced budget" and domain expertise that explicitly sits outside the core.

This distinction separates a true venture studio from an innovation "sandbox." A sandbox is a place for play without consequence. A venture studio influences where the money gets allocated. "You need to say: this is outside the core—we take care of it." This requires a level of trust from leadership to allow the team to ask uncomfortable questions and pursue paths that might seem counterintuitive to the core business.

In an engineering-driven company, buzzwords are the enemy. "AI is taken as a buzzword, and it puts a lot of our engineers off." Talking about trends in the abstract does not move the needle.

The lesson here is translation. Sofia emphasizes that innovators must convert high-level trends into "actionable insights and venture theses" that stakeholders can say yes or no to. If the foresight doesn't land as a concrete business hypothesis, it will be dismissed by the technical experts who built the company's legacy.

Perhaps the most powerful tool in the innovator's arsenal is storytelling—specifically, storytelling that measures the risk of doing nothing.

This reframing is critical. Leaders often view innovation as a cost center. By narrating the cost of inaction, the conversation shifts. Storytelling becomes a leadership tool to demonstrate that the company cannot afford to rely solely on incremental innovation. The "safe" path of doing what has always been done is actually the most dangerous path of all.

In its early days, the studio suffered from an "ivory tower setup." This separation created a dynamic where the innovation team was seen as a competitor to the business units.

The position has been reinvented. "Now we're much more embedded—we're in those strategy discussions before the idea even comes up." This integration transforms stakeholders from competitors into partners.

The division of labor has also been clarified. Horizon 2 innovation—adjacent growth—sits with the business units. The venture studio focuses purely on Horizon 3. "It's not something we can just hand off to the business units. It's too risky and needs to be protected."

Spinning efficiently isn't enough if the gears aren't connected to the larger engine. The next step is to influence the whole strategy planning machine and not risk spinning in place.

This means using AI to build smarter startup scouting radars and accelerating venture sprints to be more accurate. More importantly, it means continuing to fight the battle for the moonshot.

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