The occasion of the 50th meeting of the Corporate Venturing Network Netherlands last month was marked with the publication of a book which draws on the experiences of fifteen of its member companies. Written by two former executives of Philips, Dr Corina Kuiper and Dr Fred van Ommen Corporate Venturing, Managing the innovation family in a dynamic world, starts with a salutary history lesson on the fate which befell the Dutch East India Company when it failed to innovate; it took the Dutch government about 100 years to pay off its debts.
Moving swiftly on to more modern times, the book attempts to identify a link between stock performance and innovation. Companies perceived not to have been innovative enough and have therefore struggled to survive (Kodak, Nokia and HP) have underperformed the Nasdaq stock index compared to others such as Amazon, Salesforce and Apple whose share prices have consistently outperformed the market. As a result, the writers conclude that corporate venturing is no longer a ‘nice to have’ but a ‘need to have’ as it is a driving force behind transformation and disruptive innovation.
The narrative moves along to looking at the prinicples of corporate venturing, reviewing several models and theories, and looking at how corporate venturing is expanding from external investments to include a number of other business models, from incubator and accelerator programmes to developing the innovation community through ecosystem venturing. Building on the theory of the Bell Mason Group published in 2011 in Global Corporate Venturing that there have been five waves of corporate venturing, Kuiper and van Ommen believe we are now at the start of a sixth wave, characterised by corporates increasingly having to work with partners to co-create ecosystems.
The relationship between a corporate and its portfolio company is compared to a family, with the corporate as parent and the startup as a young person going through various stages of growth. Handy lists of top 10 tips for both ‘parents’ and ‘children’ are offered up.
The book then takes a deep dive into the venturing activities of 15 member companies including semi-conductor maker ASML, glass manufacturer AGC Asahi Glass, advanced materials firm Sibelco, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines and chemistry group Solvay.
Corporate Venturing: Managing the innovation family in a dynamic world is available to purchase on Amazon. ISBN 978-90-79812-17-12. For more information contact corina.kuiper@cvnn.eu