Official recognition has come to a method of entrepreneurship. This month’s Harvard Business Review made entrepreneurship its focus and the esteemed publication allowed one of the founders of “the Lean Startup movement”, Steve Blank to write a lead article on the movement.
Blank said in an article on his blog, excerpted in this issue: “Lean goes mainstream. 250,000 copies of the May issue of Harvard Business Review go in the mail to corporate and start-up executives and investors worldwide.”
Many reading this may think lean start-up principles are already mainstream, given the popularity of the bestselling Lean Startup book by Eric Ries. Yet it is hard to begrudge a practitioner celebrating his moment in the sun, after his ideas have been accepted by an established institution.
For those unfamiliar, the movement stresses the use of a “minimum viable product” in the market so entrepreneurs can test their ideas, instead of keeping them in stealth mode ahead of a big launch, which the movement’s proponents argue increases risk for entrepreneurs.
Given how popular this approach has become among many of our readers, especially those with incubators or accelerators, I would love to solicit feedback on how these techniques have worked in practice when they have been combined with corporate venturing programmes.
Our own publication and parent publishing company this month celebrate a small milestone – our third anniversary.
It has been a fun ride, watching as the corporate venturing industry has boomed to approaching 1,000 units worldwide, up by roughly 30% since we started. This magazine also looks at European data and we record corporate venturing now makes up half of the Dax 30 and 33/50 of the Eurostoxx 50, an analysis one of our subscribers suggested we do (see tables in our magazine). In time, we will do a similar analysis for other major stock markets.
I am also particularly pleased to have Tom Whitehouse, chairman of the London Environmental Investment Forum, start a new regular column on the “clean deal”. This column is an effort for us to further stir up debate over whether the pull-back by many from the troubled clean-tech sector, is an overreaction. Its publication comes after I had an enjoyable trip to media company Cleantech Group’s Bilbao conference in April, where it was evident corporates are becoming the dominant force in that sector, as many financial investors flee. This could be a golden opportunity for corporate venturing to prove itself, if markets have overreacted – as they generally tend to do.
For those who have opinions on any of the above topics, or want to gauge what your peers are thinking, I would suggest you book for our third London Global Corporate Venturing Symposium on May 21 and 22, if you have not done so already (see information on the following two pages).
We probably have our best line-up yet at this conference, with speakers including Al Gore, WPP’s Sir Martin Sorrell, ARM’s Warren East, IBM Venture Capital’s Claudia Fan Munce, Citigroup’s Deborah Hopkins, Qualcomm’s Nagraj Kashyap, and Intel Capital’s Marcos Battisti. We now have more than 200 registrants.
