The International Business Forum’s Corporate Venturing and Innovation Partnering Conference in Newport Beach, California, last month provided a summary of how the corporate venturing world is thinking as it enjoys a period of rapid growth, with the conference seeing the airing of our data tracking a near 30% increase in the number of corporate venturing units over the past two and a half years to more than 900 globally.
How to get started?
The best way to go about creating a corporate venturing unit intelligently was frequently under discussion. Consultancy Bell Mason’s Patty Burke opened the conference setting out the best way to set up an agile corporate venturing operation. Her slide deck is here.
Burke is looking to put together an open-source effort on the best way to set up a corporate venturing programme, so contact her with any thoughts.
Ulrich Quay provided some insights into how BMW iVentures, the corporate venturing unit of the Germany-based carmaker, has gone about developing its corporate venturing programme. Quay candidly outlined the struggles the group has had creating an operation within a large corporate, and explained how his group’s biggest challenge is not doing deals, but finding an efficient way to invest in start-ups while following the rules of a German corporate accustomed to thriving with strict internal processes.
Quay’s outline of BMW iVentures’ strategy is here. Opening up to emerging markets Stanford University academic Martin Haemmig chaired a
small group of executives interested in emerging market corporate venturing activity.
The executives outlined changes in various countries, including China and Russia. Haemmig has a theory about how corporates should be paying attention to Russia now, despite internal governance problems, as it is possible the country could become an even more significant economic
force in coming years.
Outsourcing at early stage
Early-stage investors made good use of the conference, setting out their reasons for corporates to outsource early-stage activities to specialist groups. Early-stage firm 500 Startups’ founder Dave McClure compared corporates to a shy girl standing in the corner at a party, and said they should hook up with groups such as his. Shortly before his appearance, his group signed up Japan’s NTT Docomo as its latest corporate backer.
Adapting to IT trends
A diverse group of companies tried to get the assembled corporates to adopt the latest cutting-edge trends in information technology (IT).Following a presentation on how corporates should adapt to the cloud, Manjula Talreja, a Cisco vice-president,said chief information officers [CIOs] would thrive if they could help their companies keep on top of the fast pace of change in IT. She said: “CIOs are currently concerned what their role is going to be within the enterprise. This is an opportunity for them to evolve their role to bring the network to the enterprise in a distributed way. With the consumerisation of IT there are multiple forces changing the velocity at which decisions are made moving over all lines of business. This is a huge opportunity for them to take their company to the next frontier.”
Recognising the best
Les Vadasz, former president of Intel Capital, received a life-time achievement award, saying his time at the firm had been “the most exciting period of his career”.
Further thoughts
Let us know what you learned at the conference, as this summary only scrapes the surface of useful thoughts.