About Mirus Ventures

Mirus Ventures is a highly scalable portfolio of commercially viable research, incubated companies, and venture investments—all backed by an extraordinary, multi-disciplinary team of experts and advisors.

Fifteen years ago, Joe Dwyer imagined and built a new model to achieve successful disruption at scale. Around the same time, he began building and teaching an academic model of it as a professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg MBA program.

Coordination costs are the greatest challenge for any complex disruption portfolio. Generally, the greater the scale, the slower and less efficient an organization becomes. How can we make our model both effective and scalable?

For one thing, centralized capitalization is key—at least in the early stages of any effort. Mirus’ strategic leadership is responsible for ensuring that the best opportunities are capitalized, while less optimal efforts are scrapped.

Traditional organizations also tend to employ a flawed shared service model, emphasizing IT, legal, HR, and other administrative services. At their core these are risk mitigation activities and too often contribute to slow, risk-averse decisions. While certain administrative shared services make sense, the key operating and decision making authority for each should be embedded within initiatives to better align information flows and incentives.

Instead, shared services should focus on repeatable problem solving by domains that require substantial expertise but can safely be abstracted from the core initiative. This enables the provision of infrastructure (lab space, manufacturing, etc.) and resources (AI, design, software, research) without yield loss due to coordination complexity.

In addition, shared expert resources support key activities, but are organized in a specific fashion (designed and optimized over the past 15 years) to enable the injection of resources on-demand without incurring substantial coordination costs. This allows teams to remain small and agile, while still accessing an extraordinary breadth and depth of resources offered by the cluster.

The key elements to the model:

• A strategic leadership team with an investor mindset
• A combination of external (venture) and internal (studio) portfolio companies
• Studio teams are multi-disciplinary working within a common context, but on different options
• A shared services supporting team model optimized for providing highly specialized solutions on demand without bogging down the portfolio teams