The Corporate Venturing and Innovation Partnering conference in Newport Beach last month provided a glimpse of the latest thinking from industry leaders
The presentations can now be watched again, after the conference organisers IBF released video highlights from the conference last week here.
Some of the extracted highlights are as follows:
The opening address by the conference’s co-chair Nagraj Kashyap, head of Qualcomm Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of the technology company, who reflected on the booming state of corporate venturing and wider venture capital activity.
Mark Randall, chief strategist and vice-president of creativity at software company Adobe, revealed how he had been tasked with increasing the company’s “failure rate” in innovation, to take more risks.
Kevin Jacques, in corporate development at Intuit, the financial software company, talked about how the seven strong corporate development team is looking to keep track of all the major fin-tech developments transforming its sector. It is using venturing to do so by becoming a limited partner in a select set of top tier fintech VCs bringing lean start-up principles to that study.
Gary Shapiro, president of the Consumer Electronics Association, made a case for using innovation to create economic growth to solve the deficit problems of the US and global economies.
Dominique Megret, the conference’s co-chair and head of Swisscom Ventures, issued a wake-up call for European corporate venturing organisations, using numerous charts.
Arvind Sodhani, head of Intel Capital, told CNBC’s Ariel Levy “CVC is not easy, it is not straightforward. If you invest in the fourth or fifth guy in the sector you will not make money and the strategic returns will not be there.” He went on to set out ways that groups could do so well.
Rowan Chapman, of GE Ventures, talked about General Electric’s internal and long-term innovation strategies, while Shankar Chandran, head of Samsung’s $100m Catalyst fund provided insights into the wearables strategy of Samsung.