Global Corporate Venturing Rising Stars Awards 2016: Suzanna Chiu

When taking a photo or cultivating a deal, speed and timing are crucial in being able to seize what can be a fleeting moment. Those attributes can make all the difference.

Rarely are these chances seized without often substantial amounts of preparation. Suzanna Chiu, head of ventures at Amadeus Ventures, part of Spain-based travel systems provider Amadeus IT Group, has helped speed up its investment processes to improve its chances of deal success.

She said: “We streamlined the process of investment and can close a deal within six weeks or even less.”

Amadeus has made seven investments, with another one pending at the time of writing in November 2015. The firm has had one exit within almost a two-year period of Chiu taking up the role in February 2014.

Chiu, an active photographer who pins snaps on crafts platform Pinterest, was previously part of the business strategy team of Amadeus as a senior manager from 2012 and recognised the venture unit’s success would in part depend on results – and how people looked at them.

She said: “Our greatest success would be the creation of the Amadeus Ventures brand that is very visible and well known both externally in the travel startup community and internally within Amadeus.

“As a CVC, the biggest challenge is to realise the strategic value of investment through collaboration and being able to communicate that internally to the whole organisation.”

This is going well. Her boss, Katherine Grass, head of innovation and ventures
for
Amadeus, said: “The team has got much traction externally and equally important internally with pilots, thought leader spots and influencing how we view innovation.

“Gillian Huntoon, our investment manager, has been a good support and Suzanna Chiu has been instrumental in the continued advancement of the fund and drives all deals worldwide.”

As befits an MBA graduate from London Business School who then spent more than four years at Macquarie Bank, Chiu wants to do more. She said her ambition was “to be involved in a few startups that are going to have significant impact to people’s lives” and was attracted to the industry because it was “at the forefront of the world of technology and the intellectual challenge of joining the dots: what’s the relevance of what the startups are doing and the impact to the future of our business?”

Part of this impact comes from seeing how partners can collaborate to do more. “As an organisation, it’s always good to share best practices and provide networking opportunities. An opportunity would be to solve the pubic goods problem – how to encourage industry players to work together on some innovation topics that has high R&D cost.”

That is a picture worth seeing.