In its special guide to humanity’s next 100,000 years, the latest issue of New Scientist magazine, editor Sumit Paul-Choudhury said we are "a species with prospects".
He added: "Perhaps perversely, it may be easier to think about such lengthy timescales [100,000 years] than about the more immediate future. The potential evolution of today’s technology, and its social consequences, is dazzlingly complicated … but take a longer view and … we have now identified enough of the long-term patterns shaping the history of our planet and our species to make evidence-based forecasts about the situations in which our descendants will find themselves."
We are certainly in a period of unprecedented creativity and global economic growth. Historians, such as Andrew Roberts in the Financial Times last month, argue growth is tied significantly to population growth. Given, therefore, the rise to 7 billion people, the majority of whom now live in broadly capitalist countries, and nearly 70 years of Pax Americana, people have been liberated to develop creative ideas.
Innovation in turn drives equity returns – a process aided by competition keeping wage inflationlow but hindered by the retirement of baby-boomers holding much of the world’s existing wealth and looking for fixed-income "securities".
For corporate venturing groups looking to read the "dazzlingly complicated" technology trends for their parent groups, striking the right deals is difficult.
But the investments are just one metric for many of the more thoughtful groups. This month’s profile of Germany-based industrial conglomerate Robert Bosch’s venture capital unit (RBVC) shows how many units could be better thought of as a lightening rod to attract entrepreneurial attention.
Part of the reason Intel Capital, General Electric, Merck Serono and others announce specific funds is to attract publicity so entrepreneurs know who to go to with their ideas. This competition for attention is still heating up.
Global Corporate Venturing tracks more than 550 units but research by consultancy Boston Consulting Group indicates a further 9,000 companies around the world are interested in investing in entrepreneurs. This scale of development could create a $1 trillion asset class over the next few years, compared with about $100bn now, and, combined with a large increase in government spending on entrepreneurs and from the family offices of newly wealthy successful businesswomen, could mean we are on the cusp of the greatest period of capital going towards innovative ideas.
RBVC introduces about 100 entrepreneurial businesses to its parent each year while investing in a handful. For a €50bn ($65bn) turnover industrial group, this strategy makes sense as just a 1% improvement in sales from an existing product line will mean more than a 10-times return on a $10m equity investment.
But for smaller groups, such 10-times returns can be meaningful to the parent’s revenues and profitabilit. This month’s case study of Saab Ventures’ development and exit of mapping group C3 Technologies to tech group Apple is just such a home run and a first-rate example of how to turn niche research – how to steer a missile – into something with far broader ramifications.
Apple is developing three-dimensional maps for its iPhones and creating a world of advertising opportunities using C3 among its other purchases.
Such spin-outs and exits, however, are relatively rare and are to be congratulated.
These types of corporate venturing tools – internal venturing and introductions – look beyond simply the allocation of capital for minority equity in entrepreneurial third parties to try to deliver the goals set by a business that wants to continue growing.
Few businesses have the goal of lasting 100,000 years, but with the right attitudes and application of the tools for innovation being developed, such as subscribing to Global Corporate Venturing, in theory there is no reason why some organisations should end.