Scaling Venture Clienting With REHAU New Ventures Ronja Stoffregen

Many enterprises collaborate with startups, but few successfully bring those solutions into production. How can organizations move from pilot projects to real deployment?

This week's VentureFuel Visionary is Ronja Stoffregen, Director of Corporate Venturing at REHAU New Ventures. Leading REHAU's corporate venturing efforts across mobility, manufacturing, medtech, and the built environment, she focuses on embedding emerging technologies, especially industrial AI, automation, and sustainability, directly into production environments and supply chains.

In this episode, Ronja breaks down what makes venture clienting fundamentally different from traditional corporate venture capital and how enterprises can structure programs that deliver both near-term operational wins and long-term strategic advantages.

Episode Highlights

• Venture Clienting as a Third Innovation Model – Ronja breaks down how venture clienting differs from traditional corporate venture capital and venture building by focusing on becoming a customer of startups to drive faster, lower-risk innovation.
• From Pain Points to Production – She outlines a clear, repeatable framework: define strategic priorities, identify real business pain points, map use cases, and only launch pilots with strict KPIs tied to measurable outcomes.
• Scaling Starts with KPIs, Not Pilots – Ronja explains that successful innovation isn’t about running more pilots, but about setting clear success metrics upfront and using them to decide what gets scaled and what gets stopped.
• Speed Through Structure and Alignment – She also talks about how launching multiple pilots quickly comes from early alignment with leadership, clear strategic focus areas, and pre-defined processes for scouting, evaluating, and deploying startup solutions.
• Measuring What Actually Matters – The conversation delves into how the focus must shift to “number of pain points solved” instead of tracking vanity metrics like number of pilots. This ensures that innovation efforts are tied directly to business value.