During the next few months we will be making our best attempt yet to map the corporate venturing industry, creating our Corporate Venturing Brief. This high-level document, to be published in January 2014, will outline the state of corporate venturing today.
The idea is to produce a document corporate venturing units can share easily with chief and top-ranking executives to explain what the corporate venturing industry is and who the main players are. It will also explain why large enterprises are investing in smaller high-growth businesses, and how small businesses should interact with corporate venturing investors.
It will explore what the main constituents of corporate venturing are in their respective industries and how and why they took their particular approach to investing. The document will also look at the main trends in termsof the structure of funds, the geographical reach of businesses, the reporting lines they have, and their dealactivity, compensation trends and returns data.
Early consultation with our advisory board has led to a number emphasising the global nature of corporate venturing firms as a key point of differentiation. We are currently asking for advice from the market about what trends we should be exploring, so let us know what you think is important, and we can feed those thoughts into the document.
This initiative links with our Global Corporate Venturing Academy, which we have launched jointly with corporate venturing industry consultant Andrew Gaule, with the first programme taking place in London on October 23 and 24 (see details). For the first course, Fundamentals of corporate venturing, Gaule is joined by four other presenters, Tony Askew of Reed Elsevier Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of the media group, Neil Foster of law firm Baker Botts, Mark Muth of accountancy firm PwC, and Jonathan Tudor, of Castrol Innoventures, the corporate venturing unit of the lubricants company.
In our efforts to promote the people in corporate venturing this year, we will also be holding our first Powerlist Awards drinks on the evening of our Triple Helix Venturing conference in Half Moon Bay, California, on October 8. These drinks at 7pm will be attended by many of the most important peoplein corporate venturing, and we will name those at the forefront of the industry. Attend these drinks by registering for the Triple Helix Venturing conference at triplehelixventuring.com
In this issue we look at the major themes and players in both the telecoms and media industries, in a bumper double-sector issue that we will showcase every September. Also, be sure to read great articles, including Microsoft Ventures’ Rahul Sood on the interaction of corporates and start-ups, Andrew Gaule interviewing IBM Venture Capital’s Claudia Fan Munce, Trident Capital’s Evangelos Simoudis looking at corporate accelerators and incubators, and many other contributions by our regular commentators and selected guests.
In addition, be sure to have a look at our analysis of investment activity in August.
We hope you embrace the various initiatives we are doing to help corporate venturing become an established industry, and share ideas with us as to what more we can do to make this happen