Venture Capital and Lightweight Innovation: The Growing Gap
James Suroweicki writes in this month's Technology Review looking at the looming crisis in venture capital. Suroweicki's analysis partly hinges on one of the core trends in our lightweight innovation forecast - the rapidly falling cost of bringing products and services to market, particularly on the web, but increasingly across other industries.
- Anthony Townsend's blog
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Corporate Incubation: Big Pharma's Bold Move
I've been meaning to write about this for a few months now, but the news this week about GlaxoSmithKline's cutbacks in internal R&D (I'll post something about this later in the week) brought me back to a March 2008 piece in Nature Biotechnology about the establishment of corporate biotech incubators at Biogen and Pfizer. (Nature Biotechnology, "Start-ups weigh benefits of corporate incubators", March 2008)
- Anthony Townsend's blog
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Does Corporate Venture Investing Work?
One of my clients is a large global company trying to beef up its ability to source core innovations that go beyond new combinations and packaging - basic science and technology that will help it deliver new value over a sustained period.
Opening up their innovation process is clearly an important step, and as we have explored many of the potential vehicles for building a more networked R&D model, the idea of a venture investing fund has moved to the forefront of my thinking. If, as open innovation holds, many of the best ideas are outside the company, I can't think of a more aggressive way to scan, secure and inject them into an existing company.
But as the Wall Street Journal reports on Google's efforts in the area, corporate venture funds have a lot of inherent problems and a mixed record.
- Anthony Townsend's blog
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