Corporate Venturing

"Innovate" and "create" are mantras for today's companies that hope to gain a competitive edge and prosper in the coming years. But once firms take up the entrepreneurial challenge, how can they turn good ideas into viable ventures and ultimately, into successful new businesses? Now in this book, two experts on the art of venturing offer a masterly blueprint for designing, managing, and learning from corporate ventures - essential steps that will help companies lower the riskiness of venturing while raising the likelihood of success. Addressing senior line and staff management as well as potential venture managers, Corporate Venturing draws a veritable roadmap through the venturing process: fostering entrepreneurship; identifying and choosing opportunities; selecting, evaluating, and compensating venture managers; locating a venture within the firm; setting up special planning and control mechanisms; understanding the political interplay between the venture and the firm; and assessing and learning from venture experiences. Hundreds of practical insights emerge throughout the book, including how to anticipate and manage collisions between firm needs and venture needs; how to plan for changing management requirements as ventures grow; ways to get around control mechanisms that can kill a venture; methods for transferring know-how from firm to venture; how to keep a venture's intrusions from damaging the parent firm; when to use an executive champion; the benefits of failed ventures; ten survival principles for venture managers; and many more. When managed right, corporate venturing can be the key to new growth and revitalization for established companies, regardless of size. Forpractitioners, managers, and executives who want to take innovation out of the starting blocks and on to mature business success, there can be no better place to start than with Corporate Venturing.