Thank you to all the attendees and sponsors to the Global Corporate Venturing Symposium 2017 and GUV: Fusion conference last month. Now in its seventh year, the GCV Symposium is the leading event for global corporate venturing professionals, and has experienced exponential growth, attracting an enviable list of speakers and international senior delegates with more than 400 business leaders from the corporate venturing and wider high growth business ecosystem for the two-day 2017 GCV Symposium covering innovation and strategy. These leaders represented companies with more than $2.5 trillion in aggregate annual revenues as well as perhaps the largest tech venture fund ever raised – SoftBank’s $93bn Vision Fund
That was a lot of investment power in one room, to hear the view from “the tip of the innovation spear”. For a deeper analysis on how corporations are using their innovation toolset between research and development, corporate venture capital and mergers and acquisitions and further insights from the GCV Symposium see our special report.
Corporations are using corporate venture capital (CVC) as effectively the “tip of the innovation spear” as part of a broader, joined-up innovation strategy. This is seeing CVC evolve from being a me-too VC approach to one that can be far broader or wide-ranging as witnessed by the size, scale and ambition of recent developments, such as hearing from SoftBank’s new Vision Fund.
This event in St Paul’s, London, was the best yet, with:
- Compelling and informative conference program
- Top speakers
- GCV’s signature unpanels
- One-to-one networking
- One-to-one meetings
- Our revered Gala awards dinner with special speaker, Admiral Sir George Zambellas KCB DSC ADC
- The 2017 GCV Powerlist of the top 100 industry leaders, sponsored by GE Ventures
In addition, GCV’s sister title, Global University Venturing, co-hosted its GUV:Fusion alongside the symposium to bring universities together with both each other and corporates. Every delegate attending GUV:Fusion received an early copy of the Global University Venturing’s May issue containing profiles on these programmes and a unique ranking of more than 100 funds and delighted that Christine Gulbranson from University of California has taken up a leadership role to help advise and steer this community in the way Claudia Fan Munce, former head of IBM Venture Capital, and Paul Morris, chief investment officer at the venture capital unit in the UK’s Department for International Trade, have done for the GCV Leadership Society and Government Venturing Leadership Society respectively.
Given China alone in the Asia region overtook the US, as well as Europe, for corporate venturing activity last year – for the first time – the main Global Corporate Venturing awards will be held at our GCV Asia Congress in Hong Kong event on September 21 and we are delighted to have confirmed speakers from China’s largest listed company, Jeffrey Li, managing partner at Tencent Investments, as well as the country’s $3.5 trillion state-owned enterprises holding company SASAC’s international venture general partner, Silk Ventures. Other speakers from across the region are kindly giving up their time to share their insights and see how Hong Kong is repositioning itself as the bridge between the northern Asia-Pacific region and the southern.
Just as corporations are taking their place at the centre of the innovation capital ecosystem, so specific regions are capitalising on the networks and international ties to bring investors and entrepreneurs together and help them scale up.
Bringing this community together with venture peers is effectively part of the mission statement of the GCV Leadership Society – whether with VCs at our Synergize conference in New York on October 26 in collaboration with US trade body the National Venture Capital Association, governments at our Global Corporate Venturing and Innovation Summit in Silicon Valley, California, and here in London with the global university venturing community.
In general, there is plenty of capital in the market. So, as Harvard Business Review noted in the spring, we are in for a very long period of superabundance of capital. The power of capital will tumble but talent and strong business plans to boost top line growth will remain in relatively short supply – corporate emigres and university student and faculty startups and spinouts being the most promising sources -– and so will the understanding of risk taking and the capacity to invest in these talents.
As one market insider said, what is needed is a larger capacity to deploy the capital fast and wisely, which calls for strong partnerships with local organisations and funds with a high capacity to execute skilfully.
SoftBank or a host of other experienced investors can bring this experience and track record. For example, when Verizon finally closed its deal to buy the operational side of Yahoo – which happened this month – the latter’s investment portfolio, including Snap and Alibaba, will be left behind in an investing company named Altaba – a portmanteau of “alternative” and “Alibaba” with assets under management of about $60bn.
Venture has grown up to achieve its potential.