The end of corporate venture capital (as we know it)

Corporate venture capital (CVC) is widely seen as essential to corporate innovation. But most programs fail to deliver. They mimic VC or offer passive optics, promising to “see around corners” without ever forcing action. Many become innovation theatre, expensive experiments with a five-year shelf life.
That’s not just a missed opportunity, it’s a threat. The average lifespan of an S&P 500 company has collapsed from 61 years in 1958 to less than 18 today. Since 2000, 52% of Fortune 500 companies have disappeared. In a world of accelerating disruption, optionality is no longer enough.

Survival now demands strategic intent – and the courage to act on it. What if we reframed the role of corporate venture capital entirely?

Introducing the STRATEGIC Framework

The best CVCs don’t just invest in startups – they catalyse transformation. They reshape their parent companies and even rewire entire industries. But how?

Across the highest-performing programs, nine elements appear again and again. These aren’t checkboxes. They’re cultural commitments and structural design choices that separate the tourists from the orchestrators.

Together, they form the STRATEGIC framework: a blueprint for building the modern CVC, not as scout or a skunkworks project, but a weapon of market-shaping intent.

C: Curiosity as culture

Curiosity at the top – a cultural precondition for innovation

All transformation begins with curiosity at the top. Innovation doesn’t die from lack of intellect. It dies from lack of curiosity. Executives insulated by dashboards and briefings develop blind spots. The best CVCs are powered by leaders obsessed with ground truth and curiosity. They meet founders. They explore edges. They ask, what’s coming next and what does it mean?

Curiosity can’t be outsourced. It should be institutionalised as an executive expectation. If executives aren’t engaging with founders, they may be managing decline in slow motion. One remedy is to make every senior leader responsible for bringing one startup-inspired idea into their function each quarter. Even if that idea isn’t implemented, it can spark strategic renewal and fresh thinking.

T: Talent at the Core

The operator-investor-insider – a new archetype for CVC leaders

Too often, CVC heads are plucked from internal corporate ranks, finance teams, or VC funds. Yet the job requires more than operational and financial competence. It requires someone who can bridge three worlds:

• Startup-tested: has built or led a startup that actually shipped something, and/or raised venture capital.
• VC-proven: has committed capital, sat on boards, lived the VC decision cycle.
• Executive-fluent: has operated within three reporting lines of the CEO in a Fortune 1000 context.

When evaluating candidates, look for behavioural signals: Have they made hard calls under uncertainty? Do they have founder empathy and boardroom fluency? Have they worked across silos inside large enterprises? Track record matters, but so does pattern recognition and the ability to translate between the speed of startups and the scale of corporates.

Titles matter. In venture capital, authority to allocate and oversee capital is conveyed instantly through role signals – e.g., Managing Partner, Principal, Associate, and so on because the ecosystem understands what those mean. CVC teams should use externally recognizable venture titles, not corporate ones. Calling someone a “Director of Innovation Integration” may make sense internally, but it lacks clarity and credibility with founders and co-investors.

Using standard VC title conventions helps establish the team as true market participants. It also reduces friction during syndication and founder outreach. When a startup raises a round and sees a “Managing Director” at the table from a CVC, that signals seriousness.

High-functioning CVCs can also benefit from one or two additional roles (depending on fund size) focused on venture integration and portfolio activation. These team members serve as strategic quarterbacks, helping translate startup value into corporate access, and corporate priorities into startup traction. Their job isn’t to manage investments, it’s to maximize portfolio impact.

Hire these kinds of leaders, or don’t bother launching a CVC at all.

G: Govern with intention

Governance is power – why reporting lines matter

Structure signals seriousness. If you want CVC to matter, give it teeth. The level of reporting for the CVC signals the level of commitment by its corporate parent. Lower-level reporting lines guarantee marginalisation. Reporting into strategy or innovation may check a governance box, but rarely gives the CVC teeth.

Any CVC without access to the CEO and a seat on the executive committee is structurally sidelined. In simpler corporate structures, direct CEO reporting is optimal. In more complex, matrixed, or global organisations, influence can be achieved through alternate mechanisms—such as membership on the executive operating committee, dual reporting into corporate strategy and innovation, or chartered roles on capital allocation and transformation steering committees. These roles provide formal participation in decision-making bodies that shape internal investments, acquisitions, and long-term capital strategy.

The principle holds: the CVC must have visibility, strategic context, and the political power to challenge the status quo. Without that access, it can’t shape the enterprise, let alone its industry.

Governance doesn’t stop at internal reporting lines. Strategic CVCs also shape external capital flows. By leading rounds, choosing aligned co-investors, and keeping misaligned capital out, CVCs can steer governance, accelerate influence, and protect long-term strategic intent. In a world awash with capital, who you invest with matters just as much as what you invest in.

S: Shape the market

CVC isn’t venture capital – it’s strategic warfare

Now we move from internal mechanics to external power: how to bend the market in your favour. Many CVCs are launched with the wrong intent. Some are modelled after traditional VC, chasing IRR, unicorns, and exits. This ignores the true power: market-shaping capital.

A well-built CVC is a weaponised tool. Traditional VCs optimise for short to medium term financial outcomes. Well-run CVCs ,however, place moves, calculated to shift industry dynamics in its favour. It explains how its capital recommendations shift the market in the corporate parent’s favour. Every investment memo should answer: What dominant logic does this challenge? What moat does this deepen? How does this investment bend the market in our favour?

I: Impatient capital

Strategic impatience – betting on the future before it’s obvious

Speed wins. Strategic CVCs don’t wait for certainty, they act on signal before the crowd arrives. CVCs are often characterised as patient capital. While this is true from a financial sense, patience is often a mask for corporate inertia. Great CVCs cultivate strategic impatience. They back the 10% solution that becomes tomorrow’s standard. They invest early. They facilitate fast pilots. Strategic impatience is about reshaping the game before others know it’s being played.

A: Activate insights

Insight isn’t enough – action is required

Insight is worthless without action. It’s time to build the bridge from knowing to doing. CVCs don’t fail because they invest poorly. They fail because no one inside the mothership acts on what they learn. Executives often declare the CVC’s mission is to “learn.” Insights alone change nothing. Too often, what CVCs learn disappears into sanitised decks and quarterly updates. A successful CVC doesn’t just inform – it pressures decision-makers to act.

To institutionalise this, CVC leaders should create something akin to a Strategic Insights Committee. Separate from the Investment Committee, this body brings together senior strategy, M&A, and product leaders to review front-line insights. This is where market signals can become asymmetric advantage. If the CVC isn’t challenging the roadmap, it’s just sightseeing.

T: Tie to internal strategy

R&D isn’t enough – capital changes the conversation

CVC can’t be a sideshow. It has to move the roadmap, not just the mood board. Some leaders believe their R&D scouting or open innovation efforts are sufficient. It isn’t. Ideas without capital are just noise. Capital creates incentives. It earns access. It aligns interests. It drives long-term relationships with startups and investor syndicates. It does all of this in a way that other innovation tools lack. CVC should be the capital-deployment tip of the innovation spear, partnering with R&D but wielding its own authority and visibility.

R: Reverse the flow

From push to pull – embedding CVC into operations

When business units pull from CVC, rather than dodge it, that’s when the flywheel begins. To be transformational, a CVC must become more than a capital allocator. It must become part of the corporate infrastructure. That means embedding it deep in the corporate nervous system, making it durable, indispensable, and in demand.

Start by tying the CVC into corporate strategy refresh cycles. When CVC insights shape business unit plans, M&A targets, and product roadmaps, its value multiplies.

Shift from push to pull. Business unit leaders should treat the CVC like a strategic intelligence team with capital attached. The corporate’s business units should want to seek the CVC’s help for scouting, acceleration, or threat response, because they see it as a competitive edge.

Durability also requires memory. Create a CVC Advisory Council of senior leaders or a “Shadow Board” of rising talent to preserve continuity and expand internal ownership and connectivity.

And flip the flow. In addition to the CVC sharing startups with the business, have business leaders pitch their most pressing needs to the CVC. These “reverse pitches” drive clarity, speed, and capital-aligned action.

E: Engineer for durability

Built to thrive – engineering for staying power

Finally, none of this matters if it’s easy to kill. Strategic CVC must outlast regimes. During economic downturns, the CVC unit is frequently an early casualty, an easy budget line to cut when leadership feels pressure from the board or shareholders. Yet if the corporate continues answering capital calls from its VC fund commitments during a downturn, but cuts its own CVC, a serious design flaw exists.
Durability means being indispensable and making it painful to kill. This isn’t about protecting headcount. It’s about protecting the corporation’s capacity to shape its own future. A smart CVC is designed to survive the very board meetings that would most want to cut it.

Structural protections – like board-level involvement, multi-year budget commitments, prohibitively expensive severance agreements, separately committed capital – all create durability. But they must be paired with strategic flexibility. In fast-moving sectors, over-engineering permanence can turn into rigidity. The best CVCs balance structural staying power with the agility to reorient around emerging priorities. Durability isn’t about bureaucratic entrenchment—it’s about safeguarding the corporate muscle to act on the future, even under pressure.

Durability also requires memory. Create a CVC Advisory Council of senior leaders or a “Shadow Board” of rising talent to preserve continuity and expand internal ownership and connectivity.

Durability doesn’t come from CVC alone. The most resilient innovation strategies align CVC with internal incubation, corporate foresight, M&A, and transformation offices. Innovation isn’t a team—it’s an architecture. The leaders who connect these threads don’t just protect their innovation budgets; they build systems that turn signal into action across the enterprise.

Conclusion: A call to revolution

The next generation of CVCs won’t look like the last. Those who lead corporations must reimagine CVC as their most powerful strategic offensive weapon. The companies that understand this, and act decisively upon it, will dominate the future of their industry.

The old CVC model was about optionality. The next one is about inevitability. They won’t be judged by IRR, number of deals, or number of facilitated introductions to the corporate. They’ll be judged by the moves they enabled, the markets they reshape, and the roadmaps they help rewrite.

Boards and executives will know that the CVC is working when its portfolio influences the corporate’s product roadmap, M&A pipeline, and positioning in the next S-curve, rather than landing a unicorn.

To get there requires more than conviction. It requires design. The STRATEGIC framework offers a blueprint—not for playing VC, but for playing power. Boards shouldn’t see CVC as discretionary – it’s fiduciary. If your CVC isn’t shaping your industry’s future, someone else’s will – with your customers. 

The Evolution of CVC – from tourist to orchestrator

Where is your CVC today—and where does it need to go? This maturity model outlines the path from optics to orchestration.  Most programs today are still stuck in 1.0 or dabbling in 2.0. The future belongs to those who make the leap to 3.0: orchestrators who align capital, insight, and power to reshape markets.

Mark S. Brooks is a corporate venture architect and strategist. He is former head of FMC Ventures, investment manager at Syngenta Ventures, CVC founder, agtech entrepreneur, and academic climate scientist. Mark has deployed over $70M globally in corporate venture capital and advised boards on growth, innovation, and capital strategy. With a background spanning climatology, entrepreneurship, and global investment, his work focuses on integrating venture capital, foresight, and transformation to reshape industries.