At the end of the year let the reading of runes commence. For those who leave the soothsaying to others there is a handy summary of the main issues and data from the past year and predictions of 2013 available on law firm DLA Piper’s website as a webinar.
Mark Radcliffe, partner and head of corporate venture capital practice at DLA Piper, opened the presentation by confirming how corporations are increasingly using their portfolio companies as part of a more holistic intellectual property strategy to join up work done internally with the innovations developed by external entrepreneurs. (He will expand on this topic in a guest comment for the Global Corporate Venturing CV 201 supplement out shortly.)
As to the corporate venturing year itself, it has been a bumper year for exits, notably led by the social network Facebook’s flotation in the US. Excluding the bumper win for Facebook’s corporate backers, such as software provider Microsoft and advertising agency Interpublic, there has been a similar number of exits to last year, while investments have slowed a touch to more than 900 so far as syndicates and valuations have become harder to pull together, according to Global Corporate Venturing data.
But, while other data providers deliberately exclude large deals by corporate venturers, such as Cisco’s $100m round for Insieme, unless they have a venture capital firm in the round (partly contributing to the pernicious underreporting and misrepresentation of the sector,) the industry globally has probably never been healthier at the start of its golden age.
A host of corporate venturing fund and programme launches round the world and across sectors in the past few weeks, including Nielsen-backed Pereg Ventures (following in the footsteps of peers at Social+Capital and Formation 8,) GE’s software fund run by Mike Dolbec and SanDisk Ventures, means most new money in venturing is underpinned by corporations, either from founders’ shares in their own businesses or from corporations looking to tap into external innovation.
But with such growth comes an onus on the new venture units to explain how they will execute to the calibre of established groups with long-term records.
Patty Burke, partner at consultants Bell Mason Group, finished off the webinar in style by talking through the processes that many of the best corporate venturing and innovation teams have put in place and its survey of sentiment.
For the results of the Global Corporate Venturing survey into the main issues of this year, please see the December issue of the magazine, while the predictions for next year will be in the Outlook issue next month – last minute contributions still most welcome even as most people hopefully are starting to wind down for the holiday season.
