Corporate Venturing Performance: An Investigation Into the Applicability of Venture Capital Models This paper reports a study that examined this assertion more directly through surveying 95 corporate venture units across 3 continents (Europe, South East Asia and North America) and examining the association between their organizational structures, management practices and investment practices, and multiple measures of venture unit performance. Regression analyses found...

In Search of Corporate Renewal - Focus on Corporate Venturing In today's rapidly changing business environment established companies venture to sustain growth and corporate renewal. But developing new business from scratch takes time. Thus companies find it hard to justify investments in venturing: when measured by financial terms only, the track record of corporate venturing is poor. This paper drafts...

Corporate Venturing: Gold Mining or Fool's Gold? This paper begins with a discussion of corporate venturing basics including the rationale for initiating a corporate venture group, a comparison to traditional venture capital firms, and the many approaches to corporate venturing. Next there is an in depth discussion of the current corporate venture landscape including examples of successful...

External Corporate Venturing - Exploration and Exploitation External corporate venturing, which is new business creation activity through organizational modes such as corporate venture capital, alliances, acquisitions, or spin offs has received relatively scant attention in the corporate entrepreneurship literature. Based on seven in-depth case studies of large European and U.S. firms in the information and communication technology...

Corporate Venturing Modes and Their Impact on Corporate Learning Learning and increased innovation are often mentioned as some of the key benefits from corporate venturing for corporations. However, little research exists that would analyze whether there are systematic differences in learning outcomes across different governance modes. This paper systematically analyzes how the governance choice between different external corporate venturing...

Selection in Corporate Venturing This paper argues that the ability to select more profitable ventures while at the same time avoid selecting away promising ventures is dependent on not only the choice of selection strategies but increasingly on the corporate venture firms' selection capacity. This capacity is largely a function of the committed participation...

Corporate Venturing - The Rolls-Royce Model Rolls-Royce had previously become involved in Corporate Venturing in the late 80s and early 90s with what many might view as some success. With a dedicated team of three or four they had achieved a revenue from licensing of several million Pounds a year. However, in the bearish mood of...

Corporate Venturing The purpose of this paper is to comment on the challenges that Corporations find when deciding to setup an equity investment arm: Corporate Ventures CVs. This paper will focus on three different challenges, covering the reasons why Corporations decide initiate CVs, the main structural differences between CVs and Venture Capital...

Managing Innovation Through Corporate Venturing Innovation involves applying creative ideas to find solutions to organizational problems. It enables organizations to overhaul their systems and processes and increase the quality of their products. However, the paper argues that a certain degree of commercialization is required to successfully use innovation for better results. A related model is...

Adventures In Corporate Venturing From the executive summary: ‘Companies that are successful in developing new ventures have a clearly articulated portfolio management strategy covering five areas: type of business opportunity, capital investment parameters, degree of operational involvement, links with core businesses, and other such objectives.’ The companies prefer creating a separate subsidiary because the...

Corporate Venturing? Make Sure its Cautious Venturing Working with corporate venturers can provide venture capital and private equity firms with a rich source of investment opportunities. Corporate venturing can entail different things, depending on the corporate in question. A question remains in the minds of many VC investors: is the reduction in operational and competitive risk merely...

Internal Corporate Venturing Cycles: A Nagging Strategic Leadership Challenge Thirty years of systematic study reveal that many major corporations experience a strange cyclicality in their Internal Corporate Venturing ICV activity: Periods of intense activity are followed by periods of shutting down such activities only to be followed by a new cycle a few years later. Based on analysis of...

Breaking the Frame: Radical Change Through External Corporate Venturing Recently several authors have argued that faced with dramatic change, the firm needs to expand its search space beyond local search to develop new cognitive frameworks that can guide behavior in the changed or changing environment. This paper contributes to this emerging stream of literature by investigating mechanisms that enable...

Building External Corporate Venturing Capability: Initial Conditions, Learning Processes and Knowledge Management How firms build new capabilities to adapt to changing environments is in the core of strategic management. However, only recently research has addressed this question. In this paper a model has been developed that lays out how firms develop a capability to create and develop ventures through corporate venture capital,...

External Corporate Venturing: Bridging, Execution, and Value Enactment Building on Eisenhardt & Martin, this paper examines one important dynamic capability of firms, that of External Corporate Venturing ECVC. The external corporate venturing capability consists of the following elements: ability to bridge between the corporation and the start-up community; and ability to execute venturing relationships for the rapid development...

"finding new products and services that meet not only the functional needs of consumers for tasty food or clean clothes but also their wider aspirations as citizens."

A first step is to formally integrate innovation into the executive planning agenda

Second, executives can make better use of external talent for innovation, people who bring proven tools and multi-disciplinary thinking. Bring them in as your innovation partner and have a formal innovation program that span across different business units and geographies.

Finally, identify leaders to help foster an innovation culture based on creativity and trust. In such a culture, people understand that their ideas are valued, trust that it is safe to express those ideas, and oversee risk collectively, together with their managers. Give them space to experiment.

Brainstorming is really about purposeful use of creativity and imagination.

Purpose is really the heart of any business strategy and should provide the guiding principle for corporate strategy (and brand).

The next big issue is “authenticity”?  Today this word carries extra meanings thanks to the Internet.  This is not something one can “buy” with big ad dollars. This is truly how brand differentiates and is strongly associated with trust, not just brands but also on a corporate level. Adv agencies (including interactive and direct mkt agencies) fundamentally operate differently and are not really good candidates for innovation and design explorations.

3. Corporations Using Online Conversations

4. iPhone applications

5. Crowdsourcing

6. Direct Mail Makes a Comeback

7. Podcasting: Anyone Can Do It

8. Your Web Page on Every Device

9. Cyber Sabbath

Increasing returns to scale can come in different ways: positive network effect, viral economies of scale, distributed economies of scale, etc. All enterprise services offer some of these dynamics (or at least the simple network effect), and the better designed the product, the bigger these economies of scale. (Download this PowerPoint presentation of Umair Haque's work for more on the subject.)

Strategy isn't written in stone. Rather strategy is built upon a given set of economics - at the simplest level, a set of payoffs.

Today's economics are in shock - numerous shocks are rolling across the global economic landscape.

As economics changes, so must strategy. What was "strategic" yesterday is less and less strategic today.

And that requires us to have strategic imagination: to be able to imagine fundamentally new possibilities for truly strategic behaviour.

Now, that's hard work. Very few companies are able to tap - let alone master - strategic imagination.

Why not? Strategic imagination is tremendously difficult because it requires us to put aside yesterday's tired assumptions and orthodoxies, and begin to actively rethink from scratch the way value can be, should be, must be, will be created.

The surest, most lethal killer of strategic imagination is being reined in by orthodoxy: thinking that tomorrow must be like yesterday.

Here are a few examples of strategic imagination:

It was naïve for Apple to think that it could make a better mobile phone from scratch - and that a simple phone could redesign the rotting mobile value chain - or so Nokia and Sony Ericsson thought. It was naïve for Tata to believe that a car affordable for the world's poor could ever be designed, let alone produced - or so Detroit thought. It was naïve for Google to focus on doing no evil before focusing on revenue and profitability - or so Big Media thought. It was naïve for P&G to open up, and explore radical new modes of interaction, instead of pursuing orthodox advantage by staying closed - or so Wal-Mart thought. It was naïve for H&M and Zara to imagine that cheap clothes could be hyperfashionable - more fashionable than couture - or so the Gap thought. What do these examples have in common? They're examples of strategic imagination that required firms to be naïve: to start from scratch, to see, in Technicolor, a better world not constrained by today's stifling and suffocating status quo. Ratan Tata, in the article above, talks about a "leap of faith". That's the next stage of strategic imagination: being able to see and then believe in a vastly different, radically better future - and not being limited to seeing and believing in a grainy, washed-out future that seems depressingly inevitable.

But taking leaps of faith is exactly what orthodox firms are built not to do.

The edgeconomy demands firms explode their capacity for strategic imagination.

That's why only a single player on that list is an orthodox incumbent - P&G: the rest are new entrants, or lateral entrants.

Another example. I've been talking about artificial scarcity quite a bit. Here's JP Rangaswami discussing responding to artificial scarcity with artificial abundance. Now that's the beginnings of strategic imagination.

Edge strategy isn't for incrementalists. Those who think games built for an industrial era are still the only ones worth playing need not apply.

Rather, it takes a profound appetite for revolution: a profound ability to let go of yesterday's stale, tired, and thoroughly toxic orthodoxies - to explode the shrunken, stunted strategic imagination the industrial-era firm suffers from.

What did we find?

Information needs to be sorted around people, not content

[MicroMeme: A conversation with your immediate network about what they think is the most important]

First, we vetted the 100 vendors to submit to a vendor product catalog, over 50 submitted which we used the data to pair down who were appropriate for the Wave report. Hands-on lab evaluations: I spent up to 6 hours with each vendor in a windowless room to evaluate their product live using common customer scenarios. I grilled the executive team, and discussed their strengths and weaknesses. Product demos. We asked vendors to conduct demonstrations of their products’ functionality. We used findings from these product demos to validate details of each vendor’s product capabilities. Customer reference calls. To validate product and vendor qualifications, Forrester also conducted reference calls with up to three of each vendor’s current customers for a total of up to 27 customer calls. We collected hundreds of screenshots, presentations, samples, reports and all of this information was entered in a multi-tab spreadsheet that accounts for thousands of cells, scoring, and detailed explanations which clients can use to toggle up and down specific needs as in some cases, specific feature needs may need to be highlighted over others. In the bottom links, I’ve made my research process very transparent, and have indicate the other three other blog posts documenting this laborious research effort.

Related Resources I’ll be updating this section as I see interesting voices from media, vendors, brands and customers. Read Write Web: Report: Community Platforms Market Led by Jive Software and Telligent Leverage Software CEO Mike Walsh (and other vendors) have responded in the comments Josh Bernoff: Picking a community vendor? We’ve evaluated a bunch . . . Tom Humbarger: Questions if these vendors are eating their own dog food read Walking the “Social Media Walk” Telligent’s corporate blog chimes in and makes the report available for you. Read more about this Wave Research project: Part 1: Starting the Wave Part 2: Data Collection Process Part 3: The Analysis Process Part 4: Announcing the Wave, the final report

Friendfeed is an example of the trend the web is headed: content sorted by people, not by topic.