“What really matters is having a close connection with local teams and business units to serve them well,” says Jonathan Bainée, when talking about the mission of Saint-Gobain’s venturing team. Bainée has been working as external venturing project manager at the Saint-Gobain´s NOVA venturing unit since 2017. The team, which has 13 people, can be considered medium-sized and is global in scope.
The team is organised by geography. There are six in the US, five in Europe and two in China.
“Here in Europe, the team covers investments in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The US team also covers investments across the Americas as a whole and the China team is in charge of the Asia Pacific region broadly.”
“There is no division of labour in the venturing team like you would see in a traditional VC firm.”
Each team member will do every part of the process, from the scouting, selection and initial assessment to presenting ideas to local team manager or business unit leaders.
“There is no division of labour in the venturing team like you would see in a traditional VC firm, with an analyst identifying startups and then someone else selecting them and doing due diligence and so on,” says Bainée.
Saint-Gobain is one of the oldest multinational companies in Europe. Founded in 1665 in France as a mirror producer, it has become a global manufacturer of a range of construction and high-performance materials. Its corporate venturing activities, under NOVA External Venturing, mirror that global scope.
The venturing division within NOVA was set up in 2006 as part of a drive to supplement internal R&D. Between 2018 and 2019, it became the CVC of Saint-Gobain.
Main areas of interest for venturing investing for NOVA External Venturing include construction tech and property tech, cleantech, the circular economy, mobility, digitisation and customer journey.
Bainée acknowledges that the venturing team receives internal support: “This is especially true for management and R&D&I teams. Construction differs across geographies, so we need to be very connected with our local colleagues from various departments – from marketing through legal.” He added: “When we conduct due diligence on a technology, we work quite closely with legal teams from specific geographies. We also have a main legal counsel as part of the team but not working just for NOVA.”
Seeking strategic alignment with startups is key part of the work of the unit. “We work closely with market managers, managing directors of business units and product managers to understand their roadmap and their pain points in order to get them startups of interest,” says Bainée.
Part of their work is serving as innovation market intelligence for the company. “We are in touch with startups and other investors to get a good picture of what is out there. That is how we give ideas to our teams at central level and across geographies.
“We try to digest insights from the ecosystem and push those down to all the relevant internal stakeholders. We are doing market intelligence but narrowed down to the startup ecosystem only.”
A team like this can move relatively fast, often doing deals within one or two months.
“Our investment committee normally makes a decision within a week, but we need to have done much of the heavy-lifting on the project before that,” says Bainée. “Firstly, we have to have identified and gained an in-depth understanding of the startup, its technology and its fit for collaboration with the corporate parent.
“Secondly, we have someone internally to give strategic validation to the investment idea. Typically, that would be a managing director of a business unit saying that it makes sense to invest in and work with the startup. Sometimes we need a lot of work to get this kind of positive feedback from them, as making such a statement is a commitment on their part.”
Hiring policies are changing
As the team has grown, hiring policies have changed over time: “When NOVA was set up, almost exclusively team members would be sourced internally. Back in those days, it was mainly people from our R&D department. Today, we explore new areas, new opportunities. Because of this evolution, there is no special training that is necessarily required to be a good NOVA employee. We are recruiting people, most of the time externally, to benefit from their talent,” says Bainée.
Having team members of diverse backgrounds has been crucial: “We are a team of people with diverse professional and academic backgrounds. I myself hold a PhD in economics. Most of my colleagues are engineers or business school graduates.”
The verdict on team size?
Bainée says the question of ideal team size for a CVC was “quite tricky” but concludes: “I would say it depends on the parent company. At Saint-Gobain, we operate in several business segments and we deal with so many clients and so many different units. It would make no sense for us to have a small team of just three people. It simply would not be manageable.
”On the other hand, the cost of coordinating too many people [within a team] would be too high in our current setup and make it a difficult task. For larger teams, it would make more sense to have a clearer division of labour.”
