Corporate Venturing: A Survival Guide

“high risk,” unfamiliar types of investing and partnering. Financial returns have been categorized as CV participation “table stakes” and returns as a means of offsetting costs and helping to justify program continuance.

The top CVCs recognize the need to deliver on their promises. Some do so by asking two executives to support a portfolio company, one specifically to take their corporate parent’s view in discussions and the other to see how they might best understand and help the portfolio company. Others manage with one, but the key is to under promise and overde

What Didi, Tencent, and the others realize is that, as Arjun Sethi puts it, “a moat [a durable competitive advantage] today is simply a temporary buffer that helps a company get ahead of the next innovation cycle.”

The “maturation gap”—internal/external positioning It’s always a challenge to balance internal (professional CV team, compelling vision, early traction, and

value delivery) and external (committed/credible investor, value-adding partner with ecosystem vision) positioning and perceptions as there is often a “maturation gap” that the CV team must finesse in the early stages of CV program development. Key message: no “dabbling.”

Upon further investigation, a few distinct features are notable about the [fourth] wave…An increasing number of corporations view corporate venture capital as a key component of their innovation strategy. Specifically, it is part of a broader transition in corporate R&D strategies; shifting away from an exclusively internal effort and towards e

Small firms’ share of R&D spending grew from 4.4 percent in 1981 to 12 percent in 2015, the latest figures released by the US National Science Foundation. These micro-, small-, and medium-sized companies (5 to 249 domestic employees) accounted for 8 percent of sales, employed 12 percent of the 18.9 million who worked for R&D-performing or R

At the top of the triangle sits research and development. Typically, this is where large companies invest the most. One-hundred-percent-owned products developed through R&D also have the highest return. At Intel we have a long history of technology and process innovation, and we have many smart people working in our organization. But we don’t h

Microsoft was already an investor in Uber, but when it made a huge investment in Indian unicorn Flipkart, it included a provision to switch from Amazon Web Services to Microsoft’s Azure cloud-services platform. Similarly, Tencent has partnerships with its portfolio companies to use its’ rather than Alibaba’s cloud platforms.