Coming to America and London Calling

In the popular Eddie Murphy movie Coming to America, Murphy’s African prince picks a random global destination to find his future bride, and ends up choosing New York’s Queens.

While I would love to be able to say we followed the same process when picking our first US office in Silicon Valley, which opens next week, the reality is that for venture, Silicon Valley is the centre of the world, and Jim Mawson, the company’s founder, has planned to move there since we were started three years ago. Many of you have asked for us to be there, so do get in touch with Jim to meet there on jmawson@globalcorporateventuring.com

Another piece of 80s popular culture is the Clash song, London Calling (which admittedly came out in December 1979, but that is splitting hairs). It just so happens the other big location-based news for our company is our May 20 and May 21 Symposium in London, so if you are not among the many, who have already booked their places, I suggest you tune in to Joe Strummer at the link to get some inspiration. If that doesn’t do enough to inspire you, check out our great line-up of speakers including Al Gore.

If the Clash’s punk rock isn’t your bag, I would also suggest looking at the videos we took of last year’s event. These included UK government minister David Willetts, who talked about what the UK is doing is stimulate entrepreneurship, Texas Instruments’ Davorin Kuchan, ARM’s Bruce Beckloff, IBM Venture Capital’s Martin Kelly, who all outlined what their companies are doing in corporate venturing, as well as venture firm Amadeus Capital Partners’ Anne Glover, who put forward the controversial view that venture capital was actually a safer investment than the bond market.

Any way, be it in Palo Alto or London, or anywhere around the globe, do reach out to us to get in touch. Our partner events section at the bottom of our weekly e-zine lists where our team is speaking or attending next, so besides Palo Alto and London, meet us in any place in the world we happen to be passing through.

Letters to the editor:

Patty Burke, Bell Mason Group, said: “I saw your request for input re: Themes at CVIP [the Corporate Venturing and Innovation Partnering conference in Newport Beach].  It was actually quite eye-opening for me—there was such an incredible thirst for knowledge that I had not experienced at previous conferences.  I think there is a ‘next generation’ of CVs [corporate venturers] emerging—more investment means more pressure to perform, and this new cohort seems driven to make an impact, and willing to push back on its corporate masters in order to do that.  And if the corps want to reap the benefit, they will loosen up the controls—and they are.  They are not only giving the venturers and innovators greater autonomy, they are demanding that the business units have more integrated and leveraged relationships with ventures – both CVC [Corporate Venture Capital and internally incubated.

“I have been pleasantly surprised at the response to and interest in my Corporate Agility Manifesto—hundreds of views on the blog and on slideshare and many requests for the slides.  I think it hit a nerve for two reasons – it was based on examples and insights from real practitioners, and it outlines specific actions that venture groups can take to improve their agility.  Again, the theme is action as opposed to theory.  It almost felt like a bit of a ‘grassroots’ movement at the conference — a new club of ex-VCs, experienced CVCs, entrepreneurs (often acquired) and technologists pulling together to make Corporate Venturing happen.  In fact, we reviewed the conference evaluations yesterday and the interest in learning from each other’s experience came through loud and clear—the Roundtable sessions proved to be the most popular format.  And several of the keynotes – Siemens, AmEx and especially Samsung, really reinforced this theme of changing the rules so that innovation can make a greater impact.”

Bob Ackerman, Allegis Capital, also responded with his three key trends from CVIP.
1) Migration of traditional VCs to the Corporate VC world.
2) Google’s positioning that they are “not” a corporate venture frim
3) Corporate “partnering” not just Corporate “investing”