Wen Jiabao, Premier of China, in a speech to the Royal Society in the UK last month said: "Tomorrow’s China will be an economically advanced country, with its people enjoying prosperity.
"…The key to this prosperity and sustainable development is science and technology. The world is seeing the advent of a new revolution in science and technology and a new industrial revolution […which] will thus bring about a fundamental change in the development of human society in the 21st century."
Depending on whether you are an optimist or a pessimist, the change will be beneficial or otherwise, but as Chinese Taoists phlegmatically opine: "Good news, bad news, who can say?"
For corporate venturers, however, whose job is to try to read the technological road map, find and invest in companies that might benefit from or lead the changes and help their unit’s sponsors utilise entrepreneurial resources, the advice can seem like cold comfort.
Sir Ronald Cohen, founder of private equity firm Apax Partners, more prosaically recommends investors to look "for the second bounce of the ball". This requires them to look beyond the obvious trends and hot areas generating immediate attention towards the ones that will do the same when sentiment shifts in the future.
While most attention is understandably on the highlysuccessful internet-related service and software businesses, such as Skype, RenRen, Facebook, Tencent, Baidu, Google, Groupon and Lashou, that have grown in the past few years, the next bounce will be back on to the picks and shovels that make the businesses work.
As one lawyer in Silicon Valley said, the phone reception can be so bad on some networks in the region that he had to wait until Apple made its iPhone available on other phone operator networks before he considered it worth getting one.
For hardware companies starved of much capital and attention, this will be welcome. However, many of the successful entrepreneurs in semiconductors or storage have used the fallow period of capital efficiency to develop new business models or production techniques that will make them more competitive and disruptive than incumbents for longer.
They are now seeing more interest from investors, but achieving global reach and refining products to required standards will require more capital and work with customers rather than iterative changes to the code behind, say,
some online games.
This should play to the natural advantage of corporate venturing units that can offer money and other synergies. While regarded by venture capital firms with occasional trepidation for its ability to get its way, Intel Capital, the corporate venturing unit of US-listed semiconductor company Intel, has plenty supporters among entrepreneurs.
Rather than using the well-thumbed Rolodex of personal connections from its deal team, the firm has methodically structured how portfolio companies can meet and tap into Intel and its customers.
The challenge for institutionalised firms of such scale is retaining the culture and focus, which requires will and teamwork as well as talented investors. The danger for Intel and other large firms lies in hubris and trying to throw their weight around too much.
With $10bn invested over 20 years, Intel Capital has seeded and encouraged much of the technological change. Its IT sector peers, such as IBM and Microsoft, have also encouraged entrepreneurs, primarily through investing in VC funds as a limited partner and providing start-ups with other services. Together, this broader set of innovation tools has helped align good scientific and technological ideas with the capital and resources needed to change the world.
Provided one particular facet of human society – the competitive drive to develop economically – remains, then science and technology will continue to act as the motor of change, and corporate venturing will be an increasingly valuable tool in determining which groups are successful.