Tag Archives: Startups

The Brave New World of Corporate Venturing. Part III: Tugboat Venturing

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In part I of this blog, I discussed the traditional corporate venturing models. These are several variants of corporate venturing activities than can be roughly categorized as Internal Ventures, Startup Partnering and Corporate Venture Capital. In part II of this blog, I discussed the emerging corporate venturing models, namely Collaborative Venturing and Sponsored Acceleration (aka Corporate Acceleration). The emerging models

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The Brave New World of Corporate Venturing. Part I: The Traditional Models

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Every established organization must be willing and able to systemically deal with value shifts, or risk missing the next big thing.   Value shifts come in many shapes and forms, from consumer preferences, technology developments and competitive market dynamics.   Sometimes, organizations can anticipate, even create game-changing value shifts, other times, they can only realistically hope to notice shifts in time to

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Startups to Large Corporations…Take me to your Leaders!

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In a previous blog post, I wrote about the value large corporations could excerpt from partnering with startups.  Here, I discuss the converse, the value in partnering with large corporations from the startups perspective. Startups are rightly pursuing relationships with large corporations, usually knocking on the corporate venture capital (CVC) or open innovation office (OIO) doors.   That’s the easy part –

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Shift Happens. It’s How You Deal That Matters.

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For whatever reason, corporate innovation has become synonymous with new business development – but that isn’t the only way to sense for change and encourage the bold and aggressive innovation that today’s world needs from large corporations, idling on the sidelines of cash while the very real game of human happiness sputters. Taking a step back, most agree with the

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Venturing starts with Discovery, not fixation

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Stumbled upon a quote by Peter Thiel about the motivation to start a company (or a new business within an established company, for that matter). “…You don’t start a company for the sake of starting a company. The good reason to start a company is because it’s the best way to solve some important problem that would otherwise not get

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Three ways to innovate ‘with’ startups

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Corporations have begun to adopt innovation methods and principles they observe in startups (having long forgotten their own entrepreneurial roots).   For example, GE’s FastWorks program is modeled upon Eric Ries’s Lean Startup philosophy, aiming to radically transform the way the 122+ year old company introduces new products and services to market.   GE deserves credit for its widespread approach to encouraging

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Enter The Dragon

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Enter The Dragon was a landmark movie in many ways – It was the first Hollywood-Asian Kung-Fu production, it was Bruce Lee’s last completed movie (he died weeks before the official release), and it featured a never before seen diverse cast of heroes including Bruce, John Saxon and Jim Kelly.   After Enter The Dragon, everyone was Kung-Fu fighting.  The movie

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Entrepreneur; or The Modern Prometheus

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If there were ever a mythological role model of entrepreneurship and corporate entrepreneurship, it would definitely be Prometheus.  Prometheus is the trickster Titan that created man and woman from clay.  He is best known for defiantly stealing fire from the Olympian God Zeus and gifting it to his beloved mankind, for which he was condemned to eternal suffering; The irate Zeus

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Startup Accelerators should offer Lean Startup training to their cohorts – but it starts with training the trainers

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Seed accelerators or incubators like the Y-Combinator and TechStars have become increasingly popular mechanisms to support startups, offering funding, mentoring and sometimes office-space for founders and their teams.  There are hundreds of such programs in the United States and abroad and the number seems to be growing by the day. However, as reported in the Wall Street Journal, a recent

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Strategic Planning for New Ventures. Part III: The Strategic Choice Canvas

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Based on your assessment of the current situation facing your startup or innovation project discussed in my last blog post, the Gut Check (including a good grasp of the past and changing conditions ahead), it is time to put your core idea and inertia through the strategy ringer, or a set of decision-making criteria that should improve your prospects for

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