One definition of a Global Corporate Venturing Rising Star is the pace at which they are promoted, and Christian Noske has taken another step up by joining the $1bn corporate venturing fund recently formed by automotive alliance Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi.
Noske has been appointed managing director of Alliance Ventures, which will get 40% of its capitalisation from each of Renault and Nissan, while Mitsubishi will supply the other 20%.
Noske will work alongside François Dossa, chief executive of Nissan Brazil since 2012, who left his old position to lead Alliance Ventures and co-manage its creation with its deputy head, Matthieu de Chanville, formerly a senior executive at consulting firm Boston Consulting Group.
Alliance Ventures hired Noske from a BMW i Ventures, the corporate venture capital unit of the eponymous Germany-based car maker, where he was a partner.
Noske was a GCV Rising Stars winner in 2016 and 2017 following a promotion in 2015 to investment principal at BMW i Ventures and a further promotion to partner. His deals at the unit included investments in carpooling service Scoop and automotive media platform Rever.
Noske said for his 2016 Rising Stars profile: “A lot of corporate venturing units work in the same way and make the same mistakes. They all start by saying ‘we want to be very protective, we want to keep it close to the company’.
“If you are coming from an industry, such as car manufacturing, that is an older industry, we have a tendency to set up corporate venturing units so they are not as dedicated as perhaps Google or Intel are.”
For 2017’s award, Noske added: “My goal is to prove that CVC can be as financially successful as the top institutional VCs and at the same time achieve strategic goals and drive value for the corporation.”
After studying economics and computer sciences in Stuttgart, Germany, Noske went on to business development roles before finding an interest in consumer product development at Germany-based industrials group Robert Bosch.