There is an interconnectedness in modern industry and society. People working in an area often have to grapple both with changes unique to their sector through refining and improving products, or meeting unmet needs but also indirect shifts, such as the internet and mobile communications, that affect multiple industries.
Larry Keeley, president of consultancy firm Doblin, part of the influential Monitor Group, in a thoughtful speech at the excellent IBF Corporate Venturing and Innovation Partnering conference* last month said there was an "interconnectiveness or porousness of modern industry". This sense of movement is right but lucidity comes only when things are still.
In an interview with the Financial Times last month, Paul Rudd, former prime minister of Australia, evocatively described being at the April 2009 Group of 20 summit during the nadir of the credit crisis. Rudd tells FT Asia managing editor David Pilling: "There we were, all dog-tired, all flown in from wherever and knowing that unless we came out with a coherent set of actions … the markets would collapse." This, evidently, is not how things should be done, Pilling writes (click here to read the FT article).
In the business world, corporate venturers should be in the perfect position to help their chief executives prepare their own coherent answers to testing times as their role calls for a strong awareness and alignment with the strategic and tactical needs of the sponsor as well as keeping close to the market and competitive shifts taking place.
Too often, however, the demands on time plus information- overload mean corporate venturing only rarely achieves the tranquility required for lucid thought.
At the IBF conference, while the overall atmosphere was positive and a host of new units have been set up (see news pages 11-16), a succession of senior managers bemoaned the lack of resources and compromises made to start with.
One said: "The plan to set up the venturing unit called for a number of offices round the world and for a team able to look across different sectors. Instead, the resources mean we have an office here [in the US] and spend our time dealing with our industry."
These are the issues of dealing with global innovation and competition and the challenges and opportunities crossing sector boundaries that will dominate the inaugural Global Corporate Venturing symposium and best practices event on May 18. The event is being run with this publisher’s strategic partner, consultancy firm Frost & Sullivan, which is hosting its Growth, Innovation and Leadership forum and awards on May 17 and 18, also at the Emirates Stadium in London – email me for more information (see advertisement, page 5).
However, given a history of overambitious launches, it is understandable a unit should have to prove itself over years or decades before it can expand to the size and sophistication of Intel Capital, Novartis or General Electric, the most influential corporate venturing unit in the industrial sector (see table, page 26).
The sector is one of the most interesting because of its sophistication in pulling together a cohesive package of innovation techniques, including competitions, licensing, partnering, corporate venturing and incubation.
Almost any of the top 20 industrial companies in the Global Corporate Venturing ranking could be the most influential in perhaps any other sector. Industrial companies have proved over years and decades how to invest in innovation and work globally in ways companies from other sectors struggle to replicate.
The list is diverse regionally, too, as the first and second generation of managers that built challengers to the developed world’s dominant manufacturers are starting to lay the groundwork for the evolution or revolution required to maintain their place and explore the opportunities in other sectors.
* Editor’s note: Global Corporate Venturing was on the
IBF’s advisory board.