If US-based healthcare group Johnson & Johnson (J&J) has an "outsized place" in corporate venturing over the past 40 years then its newly-retired president, Roy Davis (pictured), can take much of the credit for helping shape its most recent successes.
In a cycling analogy – Davis raced to a high level in the sport – it could be said he has won the yellow jersey.
Davis took over in January 2008 as president of Johnson & Johnson Development Corporation (JJDC), where he directed the creation of RedScript Ventures to support early-stage external ventures and internal idea incubation.
He also spent the four years as vice-president of corporate development at J&J responsible for acquisition and licensing in areas outside of its business sectors and management of the medical device maker’s wholly-owned ventures as well as corporate venturing before retiring at the end of 2011.
In total, Davis, spent nearly three decades at J&J, having joined in 1984, and worked his way through line leadership positions of increasing responsibility in the organization in the US, Europe and Asia, and then to worldwide franchise chairman for diagnostics in 2003, where he spent the five years before taking JJDC to its next level of development.
These efforts focused on developing new companies for J&J, while he also serves as a member of the industrial advisory board of the Cleveland Clinic and is now on the board of innovation consultancy group Innosight set up to implement the ideas of disruptive innovation by academic Clayton Christensen.
Davis said: "J&J has many mechanisms for growth, one of which is its venture component. Our vision is to generate new, high-growth businesses on a regular basis, at least one per year, and so J&J created a mechanism to invest and link portfolio companies to the company.
"These links might mean the sale of a JJDC portfolio company to the parent, and over the past four years we have tried to be more predictive of J&J strategy and invest into white space as well as areas J&J’s main operating sectors are interested in."
But while there is no doubting Davis’s focus on delivering profitablegrowth for J&J – he cut its venture portfolio by about a third during his presidency so there was greater strategic focus on the remaining portfolio, this has come with a wider appreciation of why the company is in business.
In November, Davis, on behalf of J&J, picked up the Preeclampsia Foundation’s 2011 Hope Award for Outstanding Corporate Partnership for service to healing pregnancy-induced hypertension.
As Chris Coburn, chief executive of Cleveland Clinic Innovations, the medical centre’s corporate venturing unit, said: "Roy sees healthcare as a humanitarian, not just a businessman. Coming from the technical side of J&J he sees how the march of science can improve lives, whereas a lot of people can get high up in this industry and not care about this.
"JJDC itself is one of a relatively small group of leaders in medical innovation and at the top rung; it is the Kleiner Per-kins of corporate venturing. It has an outsized place in the community of corporate venture capital and is a case study for other large organisation in how they invest and develop entrepreneurialism."
It could, therefore, be said Davis has ridden a good race for venturing so far.