Christensen’s work, along with University of California professor Henry Chesbrough’s theory of open innovation published a few years later, effectively laid much of the intellectual foundation for how and why corporations needed to look more closely at the external startups and find better ways to work with and understand them.
Young Sohn, chief strategy officer at conglomerate Samsung, in a keynote at the Summit as he became the new chairman of the GCV Leadership Society, laid out the challenges he faced as the company’s strategy that took it to first place over 50 years in multiple industries as a fast follower was having to change to stay number one and also still be agile to capture the mega trends and new opportunities through multiple venturing and innovation strategies.
Sue Siegel in receiving her GCV Lifetime Achievement Award on the first morning, presented by Greg Heibel, partner at law firm Orrick, said corporations were using buy, build and partnering strategies informed and supported by their venturing units, which were “here to stay”.
Scott Sandell, managing general partner of one of the world’s oldest and largest VC firms, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), in his interview by Dave Flanagan, vice-president and senior managing director of Intel Capital, agreed and said “bad experiences” with corporates were now a distant memory.
But more money and investors from different backgrounds was bringing challenges.
Scott Kupor, managing partner at VC firm Andreesen Horowitz, in his fireside chat with Mark Radcliffe, partner at DLA Piper, “The idea that capital is no longer a scarce resource is prevalent today and that was not the case up until a decade ago…. What else do we bring to entrepreneurs in addition to financial capital?”
In this new world of venture investing, being able to bring customers and help develop the entrepreneur’s products and services can be as valuable to building a scale-up that a corporation will want to buy. The second day of the summit will start with Kaloyan Andonov from GCV Analytics sharing insights gleaned from the World of Corporate Venturing annual data review and survey on how the blurring of public and private capital markets is creating the investment trends for the new decade.
