Building New Ventures and Intrapreneurial Capability with Pentland Brands
We helped build a portfolio of internal ventures and cultivate entrepreneurial leadership to accelerate innovation across their sport and lifestyle brands.
Context
A Rich Legacy of Innovation
Pentland Brands is a global brand management company behind some of the most recognised names in sports, fashion and wellness — including Speedo, Berghaus, Mitre, Canterbury, Ellesse, and Kickers, amongst others.
To remain at the forefront of the fast-evolving health, fitness and wellness markets, Pentland understood that future growth would depend not only on its existing brand portfolio but also on its ability to generate new ventures from within. With consumer values, technologies, and market dynamics shifting rapidly, the company recognised intrapreneurship as a key lever for long-term innovation.
Pentland asked Studio Zao to help identify and develop new venture opportunities while activating entrepreneurial mindsets and capabilities across its organisation.
Approach
The engagement focused on two core strategic objectives.
Venture Creation: Build a pipeline of internal ventures — small, de-risked bets with the potential to evolve into new business models, propositions, or revenue streams.
Intrapreneurial Capability: Develop a repeatable process and internal leadership pipeline for innovation — identifying talent with the curiosity, resilience, and mindset to lead future transformation.
1. Strategic Framing
We first surfaced opportunities. We began with a series of challenge framing workshops with the innovation leadership team, where we explored where Pentland sees the future of sport, health, and wellness evolving. Through these collaborative sessions, the group surfaced and prioritised 12 core consumer-facing innovation challenges that reflected the most urgent needs and disruptive opportunities facing their brands.
2. Disruption Day
Then, we accelerated venture concepts through rapid experimentation to catalyse ideas into tangible propositions, we designed and ran a high-impact “Disruption Day”. The hack brought together:
60+ participants from across Pentland’s brands and business units.
12 cross-functional teams, each tackling one of the pre-identified innovation challenges.
6 expert Studio Zao facilitators providing lean venture guidance.
6 external entrepreneurs embedded within teams to inject external thinking and pace.
The entrepreneurs were sourced from Studio Zao’s global startup network and included founders from Sweat & Sound, MODUU, Dressipi, RunFriendly, Suppl.ai, and Deuce Tennis — each bringing deep domain expertise and startup discipline.
Over the course of an intensive day, teams progressed through key lean innovation stages:
Challenge deconstruction & customer segmentation
Ideation & solution mapping
Risk assumption mapping
Validation experiment planning
Pitch preparation and delivery
By the end of the day, every team had developed a focused action plan and pitched their idea to peers and facilitators.
3. Venture Validation & Executive Pitching
Following Disruption Day, the teams consolidated into nine ventures. Over July and August, these ventures ran validation sprints — conducting customer discovery, refining their value propositions, and testing key assumptions.Studio Zao provided one-to-one venture coaching throughout the process, helping teams remain focused, adaptive and evidence-led.
All nine ventures pitched to a senior judging panel including the CEO, Innovation Director, Global President of Footwear and Investment Director. Each team aimed to secure one of the following:
Executive sponsorship for MVP or pilot funding
Additional time and resources for continued validation
Strategic feedback to inform next steps
Impact
Of the nine final ventures:
3 ventures secured executive backing, dedicated teams, and resources to build MVPs
2 ventures were awarded additional time and support for continued discovery and testing
2 ventures concluded their journey with valuable learning and mindset shifts
1 venture remained pending leadership review at the time of reporting
Just as importantly, the programme gave Pentland a powerful lens into its intrapreneurial talent. Across the business, employees gained hands-on experience in solving real-world challenges with entrepreneurial tools — fostering a culture of experimentation and ownership.
This engagement delivered more than a one-off innovation event. It created a repeatable venture-building process and activated an internal ecosystem of entrepreneurial leaders equipped to drive long-term innovation.
“Studio Zao took us through a strategic and immersive venture building process. It was insightful to see how the teams’ propositions transformed through customer engagement and validation, with three propositions going forward into pilots and a number of entrepreneurial talents recognised in the business.”