Corporations, such as France-listed Schneider Electric, are recognising the same can hold true in open innovation and dealing with entrepreneurs as it became one of the investors in Israel-based venture capital firm Grove Ventures Capital’s $120m second fund.
Calcalist reported Schneider Electric had committed $10m in the fund. Jean-Louis Stasi, a vice president at Schneider Electric said in a statement to Calcalist: “The investment and partnership with Grove is intended to give us a deep presence in the Israeli innovation ecosystem, which is now one of the world’s fastest-growing in the fields in which Schneider Electric has an interest in, such as industry 4.0, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.”
Schneider Electric has also set up and spun out its first corporate venturing unit, now called Aster Capital, and last year formed its most impressive one so far under a strong team, including hiring ABB’s Grant Allen and Qualcomm’s Varun Jain, at SE Ventures.
Third-party fund commitments, direct investors and an openness to accelerators, incubators and intrapreneurs promise a vigour and level of activity that create the conditions for more shots and hence goals – when done well. Experienced managers aligned to business units and senior management prepared to listen and respond to the opportunities created or threats uncovered and make sense of the signal out of the noise remains a further challenge.
And the same is true at a regional level. From Israel to India, London to Lisbon and California to Colombia, and seemingly all points between, the conditions for success still revolve around smart people in an environment to encourage and support entrepreneurship and with access to the capital, customers, product development, employees and contractors and acquirers.
From our Tel Aviv conference earlier this month, Global Corporate Venturing’s Madrid office will this week be in Barcelona in partnership with local business school Iese as part of its week-long series of events even if Mobile World Congress has been cancelled in the city this year. See you there.
