Early Stage Report 2015: Methodology

Hypothesis: The more innovative corporations will want to work with the more entrepreneurial-minded universities and public research centres to access the ideas, employees and spin-outs/startups they can use.

Global Corporate Venturing used its proprietary ranking of corporate venturing units as a proxy for the innovation status of 1,000 large businesses across sectors and regions. Its survey asked more than 110 of these corporations to provide their qualitative perspective on whether they looked to universities for help when looking for early-stage ideas and investments.

Global University Venturing in turn asked 50 groups from its audience of the top 350 universities and public research labs what insights and quantative data they could share to show numbers of spin-outs, student startups, support post-institution, research commercialisation, such as licensing fees, where students work after graduating and their societal impact to the region. Global Corporate Venturing complemented this perspective with its unique database of corporate investment in early-stage companies to analyse any trends in the university entrepreneurs that are being backed.

The survey respondents included the most influential and innovative institutions from around the world, including 20% of the most important universities from the Global University Venturing VIP list and 22% of the top 100 most influential people from the Global Corporate Venturing Powerlist.

Out of this survey and data, and the years of research refined through the magazines themselves, have come some best practices for universities and research labs in engaging their entrepreneurial community and incumbent corporations that can aid them as part of their own open innovation best practices at the early stage.

We thank the editors of Global University Venturing and Global Corporate Venturing, Gregg Bayes-Brown and Toby Lewis, respectively, and their teams, including Thierry Heles, Amy King and Kaloyan Andonov, and we are grateful for the support of the European Commission through Erik Vermeulen at Tilburg University, Russian Venture Company and Kauffman Fellows, through John McIntyre in particular, as well as contributors of articles, data and survey insights in the list of acknowledgements.

Acknowledgements

Satt Sud Est, Tsinghua University, Ural Federal University, Satt Conectus, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, ITMO University, Delft University of Technology, Stanford University, Heidelberg, University of Birmingham, University of Helsinki, University of Minnesota, Uppsala University, Warwick University, University of Strathclyde, University of California Los Angeles, University of Oxford, Umass Lowell, Politecnico di Milano, McGill University, University of Pittsburgh, City University London, Johns Hopkins University, Imperial College London (Imperial Innovations), University of Helsinki, Maastricht University, University of Manitoba, University of Southampton, Oregon State University, University of Edinburgh, Ghent University, MIT, Texas Tech University, Temple University, University of Pennsylvania, Lobachevsky State University of Nizhni Novgorod, Oxford Brookes University, Ohio University, Harvard, Ariel University, Tilburg University, Russian Venture Company, Work-Bench, Vilicus Ventures, Wearable World, J4T Ventures, Sustainable Hub, Business Development Bank of Canada, Siemens, Volvo, J&J, Merck Serono, Bertelsmann, Deutsche Telekom, First Data Ventures, Citrix Startup Accelerator, UPS, Flextronics, Telefonica, Wayra, KLM, Cisco, Telecom Italia, Syngenta Ventures, PPM Oost, NXTP Labs, L Marks, D Labs, IndicatorCapital, GlaxoSmithKline, Arch Venture Partners, QB3 and Mission Bay Capital, Rabobank, GE Ventures, Maryland Venture Fund, National University of Ireland Maynooth, UK Trade & Investment, Marcura Group, Samsung, Mars Innovation, The Design Accelerator, Aspen Lane, NXTP Labs, Invest Detroit, Jefferson Lab, Icex, Pangaea, Muru-D, Accenture, Capco, Munich Network, The Data Lab, Knife Capital, FisherBroyles, Hubraum, Hutchison Ports UK, Austral Capital, Exathon IP Discovery Process, SDG&E, BP, VNT Management, Ernst & Young, SBS Seed Fund, Cleantech Group/i3Connect, Thermedx, Eleven Accelerator, Centria Partners on behalf of Bradesco, Argo Design, Pantheon Equity, Agilent Technologies, Startdoms, Healthwizer, Endeavor, MobileSolve Group, AGS Capital, MACH37, Yet2, Healthbox, High-Tech Grunderfonds, JSR Corporation, Bullpen Capital, BMW, Autotech Ventures, GameFounders, Grants4Apps, Capital A Partners, Bioenterprise, Go Beyond, Martlet, Q13 Corporate Venturing, HealthBox, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, Becton Dickinson, RocketSpace, IBM, Cradle Investment Programme, InQlab