Corporate Venturing: Accelerate growth through collaboration with startups, reviewed

By @SimonCocking, review of Corporate Venturing: Accelerate growth through collaboration with startups, by  Dado Van Peteghem and, Omar Mohout. Available from Amazon here.

Different strategies and tactics to accelerate innovation and growth through collaboration.

Corporate Venturing is so much more than CVC – Corporate Venture Capital. The aim of this book is to provide insights into the different strategies and tactics to accelerate innovation and growth through collaboration, as well as plenty of cases as examples where these models are successfully applied. This is not a book for people that are looking for complex innovation theories around venturing. Rather it’s a no-nonsense, ready-to-apply comprehensive guide for creating and reviewing your corporate venturing strategy as strategic growth. The book will provide guidance, insights, perspective and inspiration for anyone that has interests in corporate venturing as a strategy to accelerate growth. With cases from Ricolab, BNP Paribas Fortis, Roularta Media Group, SNCF and Cartamundi.

The world of corporate investment is vast, rapidly changing, and also adapting to deal with the variety of options out there. This book is a useful guide for those looking to move into this area, kinda an ‘Angel 101 guide’ except that it covers a much wider range than just Angel investor options. It is impressive and also perhaps slightly dizzying to realise how many different options there are to invest. Throughout the book there is an ongoing thread of common sense and clearly experience based insights. When you read ‘don’t f@@k up the culture’ you sense they are speaking from having seen promising startups gone bad due to badly managed corporate investment. It is the classic negative outcome where the hungry scrappy startups raise more money than they ever dreamed of, and then either go astray (too much money is as much of a problem as too little) OR the genius founder becomes absorbed into a corporate environment that does not value nor know how to use him/her.

These asides keep the book interesting, readable and peppered with useful real world nuggets. We had not heard of either of the authors before, but they have created a useful insightful book. Which is worth reading if you are planning to move corporate / institutional funds into the startup investment world – which is probably not a bad idea in this time of multiple ICOs popping up with interesting investment opportunities.

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