Erik Vermeulen, head of governance at Philips Lighting and professor of business and financial law at Tilburg University, gave the keynote speech at the Global Corporate Venturing Symposium today and took the opportunity to argue for a new approach to corporate venturing.
Vermeulen suggested corporate venturing should be used to remove the corporate aspects of the parent company in order to bring it into the 21st century.
Once you act as a corporate, he claimed, you lose customers and cited the example of ride hailing app provider Uber’s failure to fight regulations in Austin, Texas earlier this month by acting like a corporate, which resulted in the company’s forced departure from the city.
In fact, Vermeulen argued, millennials will abandon a company if it shows any signs of acting like a big corporation and will not want to work for it, resulting in a lack of talent.
He said corporate venturing should be used to tackle challenges such as environmental sustainability, automation, business complexity and regulation, disruption and hyper-competitive global markets, but all of these aspects should be considered with a view of attracting and retaining talent.
Talent abhors complexity, Vermeulen stated, because red tape and complexity stifle innovation. Vermeulen listed seven corporate venturing strategies to achieve the goal of making the parent company “uncorporate”.
Those strategies involve direct and indirect investments; external incubators and accelerators; co-working spaces; retaining acquired founders and maintaining acquired startups’ identities; in-house incubators; and turning the corporate into an ecosystem with fluid and vanishing boundaries with the outside community.
Vermeulen concluded by stating that he is currently collecting data on such corporate venturing efforts and promised to return to the symposium in 2017 to present his findings.