Global Corporate Venturing Rising Stars Awards 2016: #5 Rowan Chapman

Data helps drive decisions in investing and medicine. When it comes to forming the right conclusions from the analysis, though, it is about talent and experience.

Here, Rowan Chapman, managing director of new business creation and healthcare investing at GE Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of US-listed General Electric, has already excelled.

Chapman also sits on the board of Evidation Health, the first healthcare offshoot firm incubated and launched from GE Ventures, in partnership with US university Stanford Medicine’s Health Care academic health system, in order to try to clinically prove a health technology product is helpful for patients.

Evidation was launched in March 2015 out of 2014’s merger with the Activity Exchange, an insight and personalisation platform to help consumers achieve sustainable behaviour change, according to Christine Lemke, chief product officer at Evidation and former co-founder of Activity Exchange.

Developing offshoot firms is an interesting development for corporations to try to create majority-owned subsidiaries that can respond in similar ways that private startups would.

GE has set up two other such offshoots alongside Evidation in the past year to November 2015, according to Chapman, who said: “A particular success is learning how to create majority-owned entities that GE consolidates but that retain and attract entrepreneurial management. Each company creation is different and challenging in its own way.”

It is this managerial ability that is particularly striking, especially coming from 11 years as a venture capitalist at Mohr Davidow Ventures (MDV) until 2012 when she joined GE.

As Chapman said: “In every project, there are moments when some team members are excited to move forward and others are uncertain.

“Learning to navigate these moments and unify the team is a joy and challenge, especially in a large company where team members might have different incentives.”

“I enjoy a combination of strategy, entrepreneurship and investing at the intersection of different industries.

“Corporate VC allows me to do it all – to work with a variety of business units on growth strategies, learn from seasoned operators and intersect with entrepreneurs and university innovators. At GE, I am lucky enough to have colleagues, projects and investment opportunities cross industries from lighting to healthcare to the industrial internet.”

The top rising stars seem to combine the ability to find and work with visionary entrepreneurs and gain internal corporate support for projects and ideas in conjunction with having an internal desire to want shape the world.

Chapman said: “I would like to spearhead a growth strategy for data-driven medicine that reduces cost and increases quality of cancer care.

“My dream is to have that result in a new business unit for GE that partners with an ecosystem of associated venture investments.”

As to how the industry could improve, she added: “I think that corporate VCs should collaborate more closely with academic institutions to help spin out companies that fill real needs for their parent corporations.

“This would help bridge the gap between innovators and the natural acquirers of startups, and channel capital toward projects with well understood market needs.”

Her background means Chapman can cross the divide between venture investor, academia and startups.

As a scientist, she took a first in biochemistry from Cambridge University before undertaking her PhD at the Munro Lab there in the 1990s. She then moved from the UK to US for post-doctoral research at the Walter Lab of the University of California, San Francisco, after which she made the leap into industry. Her first roles in the US were as a business development and marketing executive in two companies, Nasdaq-listed Incyte Genomics – at the time she worked there it was called Incyte Pharmaceuticals – and Rosetta Inpharmatics, which was acquired by Merck for $620m in 2001, 10 months after its flotation.