Mastering corporate venturing is quite a feat. There are a huge number of strategies, and identifying what works for a given corporation can be hugely puzzling. Corporate venturing is an especially complex discipline, as the ideal practitioner would have a penetrating understanding of his or her parent corporation, venture capital investing as a discipline, and the entrepreneurial struggle. As each of these activities can be lifetime careers in their own right, most people will be nearing retirement by the time they check all these boxes.
For this reason the GCV Academy, our training programme led by Andrew Gaule, has been received well by the learners who have taken part. The sessions provide expert advice from Gaule and lines up a consistently informative and entertaining group of speakers.
As one of the speakers at the academy in July said: “Training a person to do venturing on the job could cost around $5m, as the decisions and interaction in the first two to three years are not the most effective.” One or two days at the academy can reduce this cost considerably, as corporate venturing veterans who run some of the industry’s most respected programmes as well as the best corporate venturing advisers impart their on-the-job knowledge both in seminar talks and through informal conversation.
Some of these insights can be seen on video here. Mark Radcliffe, of DLA Piper, talked about term sheets after our July Silicon Valley academy, which gives a sense of Radcliffe’s impressive ability to explain relatively simply the deal mechanics that are essential to mastering venture investing.
Interviews with leading executives who are speaking on the programme are also available as podcasts in Gaule’s Question Time interviews, including Harshul Sanghi, head of American Express Ventures, who is speaking in October, and Jon Lauckner, GM’s chief technology officer and president of ventures, who spoke in June.
Ignaas Caryn, who runs Dutch airline KLM’s corporate venturing activity, also spoke at the London academy in July. He talks about KLM’s decision to become one of the founding backers of Mainport Innovation Fund due to technological disruption within the transport industry. Caryn reveals how he feels corporate venturing has found its place in the broader innovation strategy of corporates.
Gaule said: “We are constantly told by attendees to our GCV Academy: ‘The last six months I have been doing one-on-one meetings with experts around the world.’ To a certain extent, where individuals do this too much, it ends up being a waste of time for them, and also the experts, who find themselves fielding multiple requests from groups attempting to understand the sector.”
He added: “This experience can be speeded up by gathering a larger group of experts and peers in one place. This is what we have tried to do in the GCV Academy, where you certainly see the expression on people’s faces during the one or two days where participants’ whole perception and understanding of corporate venturing changes.”
The truth is you glean the best strategic insights by understanding first-hand what the followers of best practice do.
You can find out about future programmes in the US in October and early in 2016 around the time of the Global Corporate Venturing and Innovation Summit, in Europe in November, and in Asia by visiting www.gcvacademy.com or contacting Andrew Gaule at agaule@globalcorporateventuring.com. Members of US trade body the National Venture Capital Association can get a 20% discount using promotion code NVCA20 on the GCV Academy registration page. Also consider team participation and the GCV Academy multi-buy offers.
This month’s issue of Global Corporate Venturing includes our focus on the media and telecoms sectors, Intel Capital’s Marcin Hejka on the investments to be made in central and eastern Europe, Silicon Valley Bank on globalising entrepreneurship, Tom Whitehouse on intriguing developments in advanced materials, as we set about launching our club on the subject, and much more.