James Gunnell, managing director of Global Corporate Venturing, and GCV head of benchmarking Jana Reuther spoke of the latest developments in the GCV Institute and its benchmarking efforts.
Gunnell commented that professionalism is critical to the future of corporate venture capital and noted the GCV Institute was meant to help the industry advance through its professional development curriculum, certification and benchmarking.
He highlighted that the outcome, a year after its launch, is the fruit of joint efforts by a host of corporates venturing units that have supported the initiative in what he dubbed as a “community-driven curriculum”, differentiated and designed to get all the parties involved.
“We have had 200 people come in during the first year to attend 10 courses from over 50 organisations. The courses featured CVC experts as panellists, mentors and guest speakers,” said Gunnell. “Our flagship course entitled ‘Landing the value of corporate venturing’ is meant to enable venturing teams and C-suite members to find a common language and help them interact and address challenges.”
Reuther noted that the benchmarking push of the GCV Institute originated in the work of the Bell Mason Group and the publication of “Corporate Venturing: A Survival Guide” by James Mawson, Heidi Mason and Elizabeth Arrington. She also stressed that a lot of executives are interested in corporate venturing, which has been on the rise, but there is a lack of solid understanding among them.
Finally, there is also a pressing need for metrics to get newly-formed CVC programmes going. This push is expected to culminate in the setup of a public directory of CVC programmes, describing over 4,000 such programmes that have been participating in minority-stake deals.
Learn more about the GCV Institute here.
