What went on at the eighth GCV Symposium in London last month

The eighth annual global corporate venturing London symposium began with opening remarks from Global Corporate Venturing’s chief operating officer, Tim Lafferty, who addressed a crowd of close to 400 attendees. Investors present at the event manage a total of $100bn in venture assets, for parent companies with aggregate revenues of at least $4 trillion. Entitled The Shoulders of Giants, this year’s conference has largely focused on showing the benefits of increased collaboration between ecosystem players, with startups and entrepreneurs helped to new heights by their corporate backers while the latter enjoy increased exposure to emerging technologies. Day 1: Morning session Shortly after the opening address, Graham Stuart, minister for investment at the UK’s Department for International Trade (DIT), took to the stage for a keynote presentation in which he reminded the audience of the key role played by London – Europe’s “capital of VC” – in the worldwide venture ecosystem. According to PitchBook Data, UK tech firms attracted a record £3bn ($4bn) in VC investment in 2017– almost twice that of the previous year (£1.63bn) – with London accounting for around 80% of that alone. The UK is also currently the leading destination for foreign investments in Europe, with around £1.2 trillion of capital invested. “Too many people see finance and capitalism as a dirty word, but they are the fuel of an advanced economy,” Stuart said, adding: “What you do matters to our economy. We need people like you, who are willing to take risks to invest in the future. Our innovation depends on startups, and our startups depend on people in this room. “In the same way that one cannot have capitalism without capital, we need capital to create the innovations of the future and fund the innovators of the future.” Stuart said the government’s role was to understand how it could add value and contribute to attracting investment, both from UK investors to foreign companies and from international investors to UK-based businesses. That help, he added, could be divided into the high-growth company question – creating conditions where UK companies are an attractive investment – the venture capital question and the international question. The DIT had formed a special unit dedicated to venture capital that had collaborated with more than 250 VCs to date and had committed to raising the UK’s research and development spending to 3% of GDP. Stuart said: “What we want is to cement the UK’s position as the number-one VC club in Europe.…

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