It is always a sure sign a topic is hot, when the best-known academic thinker of the time period and specialism grapples with the subject matter.
Corporate venturing has been paid this honour this month by Harvard Business School professor Josh Lerner, a ubiquitous commentator on all areas of private equity and venture capital, whose new book, The Architecture of Innovation*, seeks to understand how corporates can best approach innovation.
The central theme of Lerner’s book is in line with much of the management thinking fashionable among those who are keen for corporates to stay on top of innovation. Lerner perceives clear value in corporate venturing and open innovation at the same time as providing a sceptical account of the traditional closed research and development model.
Yet he also argues that corporates face great challenges in successfully implementing the corporate venturing model. This is, in part, because in order to do corporate venturing well, academics suspect compensation should be comparable to venture capital funds, which often does not sit well with others in the corporate.
Lerner illustrates how the compensation challenge can cause problems nicely, with his look at copying company Xerox’s corporate venturing unit of the late 1980s to 1990s, Xerox Technology Ventures. Other corporate venturing examples looked at in the book include a look at efforts by chip maker Intel Capital, US intelligence agencies’ In-Q-Tel, oil major Exxon and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers-managed iFund (which invested in applications for computer company Apple’s iPhone).
Lerner estimates Xerox Technology Ventures made capital gains of $175m on its $30m fund or an internal rate of return of at least 56%. Given this the corporate venturing executives were due for a performance pay-out of at least $44m. Lerner writes: “Once [Xerox’s top management] understood that mid-level functionaries in an obscure initiative were going to be the highest paid executives in the corporation, their enthusiasm for the program disappeared overnight. (Never mind that the only reason they were to paid so much was because they had created so much value for Xerox.)”
Similarly Lerner argues corporates should guard against temptation from the corporate parent to move on from the initiative too soon, by securing external funding for example. Doubtless the recommendations for locking in a long-term existence for a corporate venturing unit and the suggestion corporates should pay executives similar rates to independent venture capital executives will be well received in the corporate venturing industry.
Of course, this is not the first time Lerner has written on the challenges of corporate venturing. Back in 1998 he also wrote a favourable paper along with Paul Gompers, a fellow Harvard academic, finding corporate venturing returns had been good compared to independent venture capitalists – the following years were not good times in corporate venturing. A cynic wary of financial cycles might warn once corporate venturing becomes hot enough to attract the attention of a top academic, that the industry is becoming too big. As Lerner points out there have been four waves of corporate venturing activity in the late 1960s, the mid-1980s, the late 1990s and now. It is this recent cycle that has seen, according to Global Corporate Venturing figures, more than 200 corporations start venturing programmes and invest contra-cyclically, ie at the start of the economic cycle after recession rather than pro-cyclically, ie at the top of the bubble, which promises better financial returns even if the strategic challenges will remain.
And Lerner has a thoughtful take. He neatly sums up many pitfalls facing corporate venturing executives, and concedes many programmes will go astray. He points to “large scale evidence” which suggests corporate venturing creates value for the corporate parent and for start-ups. His view is that corporate venturing will not work in all cases, but is a fruitful option to help corporates innovate when done well. It is hard to disagree.
*Published September 4 by Harvard Business Review Press, available on Amazon by clicking here.