Bringing debate and discussion from stakeholders in different parts of the business together improves these decisions when there are shared ethics, aptitudes and attitudes. For Mawsonia, publisher of Global Corporate Venturing, Global University Venturing and Global Impact Venturing, it has been about how to continue meeting customer needs and seize opportunities when two-thirds of our revenues potentially disappears effectively overnight without in-person conferences to host or speak at.
The problems our customers face remain nevertheless – how should they organise, staff and train their venturing units and what deals should they do. Focusing on these two questions – who does what deals – narrows attention on the core operations of writing news, harvesting the data from them, turning it into reports and analyses people can use in their business and then connecting and training people to make capital allocation decisions more efficiently and effective, even when, as HBR notes, “competitive environments are complex systems, full of interdependencies that are hard to detect and responses to disruptions that are nonlinear.
“These complex systems tend to develop runaway chain reactions that decrease or even eliminate predictability, occasionally causing outsized events,” such as the coronavirus currently affecting most of the major markets and economies.
As Nuno Almeida Camacho, associate professor of marketing at Erasmus School of Economics, posted a few years after Brad Powers’ HBR article on antifragility, “psychologists have shown that humans have a tendency to strikingly underestimate the effects of nonlinear, exponential processes (see Wagenaar and Sagaria 1975; Timmers and Wagenaar 1977). Moreover, the degree of underestimation depends significantly on one’s past experiences, with more stable environments leading to worse underestimation (Keren 1983).”
Moving from a fixed to growth mindset is hard but possible and usually requires shock to the stable environment. As we prepare for next week’s GCV webinar on the 26th with corporate venturing leaders, Kaloyan Andonov’s monthly analysis in the March issue of GCV (now out) finds this shock is ongoing with deal activity still dropping in February.
Hope, however, remains. Complementing in-real life events with online and virtual meetings to the GCV Symposium on 3-4 June or adding the AI algorithms of GCV Connect’s deal matching service to how people have sourced syndicates by meeting on an entrepreneur’s doorstep creates the possibility for the whole industry to professionalise and scale-up, leaving its amateur, lifestyle venture roots behind at last.
Or as English theologian and historian Thomas Fuller said: “the darkest hour is just before the dawn.”
