Welcome to the launch of Global Corporate Venturing, a media title specifically for the venture capital industry working in companies.
This title is for the people whose job is superficially unenviable: their senior managers want to know everything important that is going on outside of the company that might affect them for good or ill.
It is basic risk management to have people dedicated to providing early warnings of potential rivals or changes that can undercut existing products or business models from new businesses or firms moving between sectors or regions, as with US- listed Apple moving from computers into phones. Venturing as a form of risk management can also offer companies the potential to expand.
The best way to truly understand the threats and opportunities is to invest in the nascent companies and ideas. As John Taysom, manager of media company (Thomson) Reuters’ Greenhouse corporate venturing fund from the 1990s, said: “You have to dream your worst nightmare, then invest in it.”
This requires an unusual mindset and rare skills to understand the existing business, culture and strategy and still be able to peer into and grasp all the concepts and ideas and ramifications of the innovation emerging from all the universities, private and public companies and people round the world. This is no easy job description, particularly as the world undergoes a unique period of change when the three main drivers of development – energy sources, communica- tion methods and life expectancy and quality – are being transformed.
Corporate venturers round the world, therefore, are in a prime position to witness the advent of new forms of energy when the only constraints to the flow of ideas are imagination and time, people living longer and better quality lives, and the power of changing global communication tools. Greater understanding of chemistry and physics drove innovation in the 19th and 20th centuries respectively and the 21st is already revealing the depths of possibility in greater manipulation of biology, such as last month’s announcement concerning the creation of synthetic life.
It seemed appropriate, therefore, to examine healthcare for the first issue of Global Corporate Venturing: to see the entire content in this issue please go to the magazine section of the website for the full PDF.
Pharmaceutical companies that evolved from chemistry labs have already coped with the growth of biotech firms, such as Genentech, often by buying them. They also have the resources, maturity and organisational structures to develop large and sophisticated corporate venturing units that our inaugural survey finds can be bigger and more active than the largest independent venture capital firms that have historically been far better at marketing themselves to entrepreneurs.
The use of the internet, semiconductors and more sophisticated technology, as well as better understanding of all organisms, how they operate and the potential to develop new ones, mean this sector is at the forefront of change. Change, however, unsettles people and brings fear – but the only constant is change, and being vulnerable to this prospect creates the conditions for growth and renewal.
We live in an age of change and the successful corporate venturers are those whose responsibility is to act as the prism through which companies can deal with a world in which they know they do not own all the best ideas or talent. They are also people who recognise that truth springs from argument among good friends, as Scottish enlightenment philosopher David Hume described it.
This phrase sums up what Global Corporate Venturing is trying to achieve: a forum and platform for the fair exchange of information that not everyone necessarily agrees with at all times but where people are treated respectfully.
This exchange of information also applies to Global Corporate Venturing, and I am keen to hear feedback of what you want to see more or less of, tips and news and help for future issues, which will take each economic sector in turn – with IT in the July issue – and examine the state of corporate venturing within it.