Al Gore, 45th Vice President of the US, has laid down the challenge for the corporate venturing industry: what type of leadership will it show?
Gore’s speech at our third annual Symposium was off-record but delegates afterwards said they wanted to meet his vision of them creating a world their children would be proud of rather than one that left them questioning why it was handed on in worse shape.
Gore spoke for more than an hour and received a standing ovation before signing his latest book, The Future, and mingling with the audience for another two hours.
He fielded a series of questions and repartee from the listeners about how to improve US politics, the impact of shale gas and carbon dioxide reaching 400 parts per million, as well as how to balance entrepreneurs’ desire to ask for forgiveness rather than permission for an action with the need to think about the ethics and long-term impact of their work.
Introduced by Sharon Vosmek, chief executive of women-led entrepreneurs organization Astia, Gore captured and provoked the minds of the crowd – whether they agreed with all his views or otherwise – and won the heart of at least one: a 10-year old girl.
Mia, daughter of delegate Andrew Gaule, founder of Corven Network, had a year earlier written a school project on Gore’s previous book, An Inconvenient Truth. In a moving private 10-minute meeting before his speech, Gore signed her project and read and discussed the subject before having his photo taken with the proud parents and Mia.
The ability to connect across all walks of life, with all types of people and on all subjects marks out the truly gifted and empathetic politicians – Vosmek called him “my President” in her introduction – and such skills are often shown by the power brokers in other walks of life.
The Symposium’s tagline this year reflected the importance of those with a high emotional quotient and leadership score with a “Power Brokers” tagline and followed a private dinner for the top 100 members of the Global Corporate Venturing Powerlist, held at the Royal Festival Hall’s beautiful Skylon restaurant on the bank of the river Thames opposite the Houses of Parliament.
Some of the top power brokers received an award in front of Gore, including Charles Searle, head of listed and social media at Naspers, for his Lifetime Achievement in corporate venturing and Intel Capital as Unit of the Year. For a full list of winners and the shortlist click here.
The agenda of the Symposium was dominated by those talking about how they were acting as increasingly effective gatekeepers introducing the right entrepreneurs to all parts of their parent companies as well as helping the business units source ideas and products and improving the efficiency of the other parts of a corporation’s innovation toolkit, including mergers and acquisitions, research and development, incubation and joint ventures and partnerships.
The chief executives of Fortune 500 companies that attended, including Sir Martin Sorrell from marketing services firm WPP and Warren East from chip designer ARM, as well as the entrepreneurs, chief innovation officers, universities (see our sister title at www.globaluniversityventuring.com for more on this area) and venture capitalists, went away from the two days with more thoughts and understanding of the industry and ways to work with them more effectively.
A sign of how important the corporate venturing power brokers are came from the many tales of extreme effort the entrepreneurs made to attend the Symposium. Bright Capital’s RTT flew in from Russia via Morocco on a one-day pass as they failed to land a visa, while Applied Ventures BT Imaging made it from Australia in order to get in front of the customers, suppliers and investors that can transform a nascent business.
A fuller write-up will be in the June and July issues and the presentations that can be made public are here, but please let me know your thoughts, stories and insights (and ways we can improve for 2014).
But perhaps the last word should go to some of those who attended, courtesy of Mark Gillett at his production company SuitCase Media: play showreel here.