Conversations at the Global Corporate Venturing Symposium last week in London hammered home how corporate venturing will be used to keep corporations on top of the shift to digital, and given how transformative this shift is to all sectors, it leaves us in little doubt that corporate venturing has become a hugely important tool for businesses.
There are innumerable trends that can be picked through from the Global Corporate Venturing Symposium in London last week, where we heard from many of the most important people in corporate venturing.
Yet one big theme that everyone was talking about was the shift to digital. Every panel and attendee brought up the importance of convergence of their sectors with others, and this is largely because business is going on-line at an exponential rate.
Intel Capital’s head Arvind Sodhani was even more specific, and in our on-stage chat, picked cloud as the sector amongst all those the head of the $11bn giant venturing unit over-saw, felt most likely to win out.
Similarly BP Ventures’ head Issam Dairanieh, perhaps more surprisingly, also talked about how digital is transforming the oil and gas sector.
We also had other panels discussing the convergence of energy and information technology, while our agricultural technology panel was joined by a specialist in the field, Deborah Magid, of IBM Venture Capital, similarly healthcare attendees and many from sectors which traditionally use IT as a tool, voiced the need to fully understand what is going on in IT as fundamental to their way of business.
The conversations hammered home how corporate venturing will be used to keep corporations on top of this shift, and given how transformative this shift is to all sectors, it leaves us in little doubt that corporate venturing has become a hugely important tool for businesses.
Over the coming weeks we will be picking through these trends more in depth, and do share in detail with me what you gleaned at the event if you would like to do so.
