Lukasz Garbowski, investment director at Btomorrow Ventures, describes how the corporate venture unit helps its parent diversify away from tobacco.
Category: CVC Advice
How Btomorrow is helping transform its parent’s core business
Btomorrow Venture’s investment director Lukasz Garbowski talks about its mission to help British American Tobacco reinvent itself in an industry going out of vogue.
Six steps to building a true innovation culture
To be truly effective, an innovation team needs freedom to operate, a separate measurement framework and incentives.
How to set the right performance metrics for your CVC programme
How you set up effective performance metrics for teams whose outcomes are a combination of tangible and intangible effects, is often as much about influence and learning, as it is about revenue.
Career paths into CVC are changing
Corporate investors increasingly come from an entrepreneurship background or have deep operational expertise in their sector.
How to manage your corporate investment portfolio in a downturn
Intel Capital, Echo Health Ventures and Fenwick & West shared advice on how to prep an investment team for a tough funding climate.
NGP Capital: learnings from a 15-year fund cycle
NGP Capital’s second fund produced six unicorns and top quartile returns while navigating significant change at Nokia, its corporate partner. Managing partner Paul Asel shares 6 insights others can take from the experience.
How to break the ‘not-invented-here’ curse: 5 lessons in open innovation
ABB Electrification has learned a lot about working effectively with startups in the three years since it started the Startup Challenge programme.
Seven steps to building a successful venture
Debbie Brackeen was give a Herculean task when she joined CSAA Insurance Group — to create another $1bn in revenues for the 100-year-old US insurer in 10 years. That was a 25% increase in sales, and Brackeen knew that just investing in external startups was not going to be enough to reach it. CSAA would have… Continue reading Seven steps to building a successful venture
6 ways to create an internal network that boosts your CVC
Strong internal networks help corporate investment teams get better results. Chad Bown, of BP, and Nicole Lapointe, of Capital One, shared tips on building them.
New VCs rely increasingly on corporate support
Corporations are playing a bigger role in supporting new entrants to the venture industry.
Most CVCs invest from the balance sheet but models range from ad hoc to near-independent
Most corporate investors (74%) employ capital directly from the balance sheet of their corporate mothership but there are many variations.
Most CVCs have $200m allocated or less
The number of $1bn plus CVC funds has increased, but most still work with less than $200m.
80% of companies have 5 or fewer people on the investment committee
Keeping the investment committee small and lean appears to be the norm and c-suite executives are usually included.