It is always useful to zone out and capture what is going on at a snap-point of time in a given industry.
The Corporate Venturing and Innovation Partnering Conference in Newport Beach last week provided a decent summary of what the corporate venturing world is thinking about as it enjoys a period of rapid growth, with the conference seeing the airing of our data which has tracked a near 30% increase in the number of corporate venturing units in the last two and a half years to the more than 900 globally.
How to get started?
The best way to go about creating a corporate venturing unit intelligently was frequently under discussion. Consultancy Bell Mason’s Patty Burke opened the conference setting out the best way to set up an agile corporate venturing operation. Her slide deck is here.
Burke is looking to put together an open source effort on the best way to set up a corporate venturing programme, so contact her with any thoughts.
Ulrich Quay provided some insights into how BMW iVentures, the corporate venturing unit of the Germany-based carmaker, has gone about developing its corporate venturing programme. Quay candidly outlined to me in a fireside chat the struggles the group has had creating an operation within a large corporate, and explained how his group’s biggest challenge is not doing deals, but finding an efficient way to work investing in start-ups, while following the rules of a German corporate accustomed to thriving with strict internal processes. Quay’s outline of BMW iVentures’ strategy is here.
Opening up to emerging markets
Stanford University academic Martin Haemmig chaired a small group of executives interested in emerging market corporate venturing activity. The change that executives around the table outlined was happening in countries, including China and Russia, was highly interesting. Haemmig has an interesting theory about how corporates should be paying attention to Russia now, despite internal governance problem, as it is possible the country could become an even more significant economic force in the coming years.
Outsourcing at early stage
Early stage investors were a common group around the conference, setting out their ideas why corporates should outsource activities at early stage to specialist groups. Early stage firm 500 Startups’ founder Dave McClure set out in his lively presentational style how corporates were like a shy girl standing in the corner of a party, and they should hook up with groups like his to become cool. No doubt his charms are working, as shortly before appearing his group had signed up Japan’s NTT Docomo as its latest corporate backer.
Adapting to IT trends
There was a diverse group of companies trying to get the assembled corporates to sharpen up their adoption of the latest cutting edge trends in IT.
Following a lively presentation on how corporates should adapt to the cloud, Manjula Talreja, a Cisco vice president, said in an interview that chief information officers [CIOs] will thrive if they can help their companies keep on top of the current fast pace of change in information technology. She said: “CIOs are currently concerned what their role is going to be within the enterprise. This is an opportunity for CIOs to evolve their role to bring the network to the enterprise in a distributed way. With the consumerisation of IT there are multiple forces changing the velocity decisions are made moving over all lines of business. This is a huge opportunity for them to take their company to the next frontier.”
Bubble fears
As flagged last week in this editorial there is a growing body of people warning that the current strong interest in corporate venturing is something to keep an eye on. Market practitioners are beginning to get nervous excess is creeping in to the technology industry and some corporates rushing into venturing will sharply rush out again. This is something to watch, and those groups setting up programmes should look to ensure the way they go about venturing is carefully thought through and long-term. This is a time of opportunity in corporate venturing, but possibly also of great risk.
Recognising the best
Many attendees were pleased to see Les Vadasz, former president of Intel Capital, receive a life time achievement award, saying his time at Intel Capital had been “the most exciting period of his career.”
Further thoughts
Do also let us know what you learned at the conference, as I am sure this summary only scrapes the surface of useful thoughts aired at the conference.