As UK-listed media conglomerate News International continues to make the news over the operations of its British tabloids, its individual divisions are regrouping with Lex Fenwick (pictured) named as chief executive (CEO) of Dow Jones.
Fenwick came from another media company, Bloomberg, where he spent 25 years and helped to launch its corporate venturing unit, Bloomberg Ventures, in 2008.
His move to the top job at one of the largest news providers, therefore, ranks as a signifcant promotion for a corporate venturer and shows how the next generation of corporate leaders might have to know how to encourage innovation within their own companies to be successful.
However, Fenwick’s appointment might also be an outlier for the industry, as he previously stood in as Bloomberg’s CEO when company founder Michael Bloomberg stepped away to be mayor of New York.
Bloomberg Ventures has since played a notable role in developing the scope of Bloomberg’s business, incubating subdivisions of the company, including the education-based Bloomberg Institute, research library Bloomberg Mart, net-working event organiser Bloomberg Link, and opening up the company’s desktop terminal to third-party developers in return for a stake in their equity.
The most crucial of those divisions in terms of Fenwick’s role at Dow Jones is Bloomberg Mart, which extended the company’s market and industry research platform, Bloomb-erg Professional, to any business owner.
Rupert Murdoch, News Corporation’s CEO, said at the time of Fenwick’s appointment that his company’s vision for Dow Jones corresponded with that of Bloomberg Mart, stating that a key task for Fenwick will be to grow the enterprise side of Dow Jones’s business, extending the premium content available to fnancial customers.
Michael Lee, a consultant for Private Equity Recruitment and formerly a member of Unilever’s corporate venturing team for seven years, said there were communication-based advantages to corporate venturing as part of a career path.
He said: "If you have worked in corporate venturing you do understand how to work well within a large corporation."
However, Fenwick’s rise is not overtly representative of current moves within corporate venturing, which has a comparatively low turnover in relation to other parts of the corporate structure.
Daniel Osmer, founder of recruitment company Spectrum, told Global Corporate Venturing in December: "If the change in the corporate venturing (CV) market is only 30% over 10 years, this is 3% a year, which is tiny. Most corporates expect natural wastage – employees leaving – of 7% to 8%. The CV market appears very stable by comparison."
Two contrasting examples of the way CV can provide uplift to a career can be found in married executives Richard and Ann Sarnoff. Richard Sarnoff rose through the ranks at media conglomerate Bertelsmann, taking charge of Bertelsmann subsidiary Random House’s corporate venturing unit before being appointed president of Bertelsmann’s Digital Media Investments when it was launched in 2006.
He was later promoted to co-chairman of Bertelsmann itself, taking a more generalised role in the frm’s corporate development in the US.
Ann Sarnoff meanwhile took a more circuitous route to corporate venturing, having held non-venturing executive positions at media company Viacom and sports association the WNBA before joining Dow Jones, later heading corporate venturing unit Dow Jones Ventures as its president.
It was while she worked at Dow Jones that she was headhunted by the BBC, joining BBC Worldwide America as chief operating offcer. This was a similar path taken by Paul Kanareck, who left Bertelsmann’s Freemantle Ventures unit to become head of brands at broadcaster ITV in August.
At other times, corporate venturing can act as a springboard to venture capital-linked opportunities outside the company. Hitesh Mehta and Christopher Smart, both general partners at the European division of International Data Group’s corporate venturing unit, IDG Ventures, jointly launched a buyout of IDG Ventures Europe, which they then launched as Acacia Capital Partners in 2006.
Mehta also co-founded semiconductor maker Xmos during his 16 month stint at IDG, and continues to serve as a non-executive director. Xmos remains start-up-sized, but attracted $16m in venture funding soon after launching and, according to chief executive Terry Leeder’s comments to the Financial Times, expects to become proftable this year.
It is perhaps the hands-on specialist experience that marks the greatest differential between the worlds of cor-porate venturing and external venture capital.
As Michael Lee said: "The skillsets [in CV] are fairly similar to what you would do in an ordinary venture capital frm, but the scope of the corporate venture capital frm is often defned as areas adjacent to the main business."
Ann Sarnoff moved from one media content producer to another, just as Lex Fenwick has taken on another business media role.
In this sense, corporate venturing can be a way for high-performance corporate executives to expand their base of expertise by navigating the more ground level experience of building a business from scratch.