Salesforce CEO Benioff regretted scaling back in 2009
Here’s the deal: if you cut your sales hiring and scale back your expectations — you may end up regretting it. Marc Benioff did. In 2008–2009, at the height of the panic, I was at Salesforce and Marc Benioff responded to the (much bigger and real) global economic crisis by cutting back on expenses and hiring fewer sales people. […]
Corporate Venture Capital’s Role in Innovation Part 4: Setting Up a CVC Organization
In the previous post I introduced a five-dimensional framework to employ while setting up a corporate venture group and discussed in detail two of its dimensions: strategy and people. The corporation must establish a long-term strategy for its venture group. As part of this strategy it must create a set of objectives, formulate an investment […]
Corporate Venture Capital’s Role in Innovation Part 3: Setting Up a CVC Organization
In the first part of the series on corporate venture capital I explored how the disruption of institutional VCs (IVCs) and the imperative for corporations to innovate provide an opportunity to corporate VCs (CVCs) to make their mark in the startup ecosystem and be viewed as viable and valuable financing sources to private companies. In […]
Corporate Venture Capital’s Role in Disruptive Innovation Part 2: Will the Big Numbers Result In Big Success this Time?
I started writing these posts with the hypothesis that in their effort to innovate, corporations must re-invent the traditional R&D model with one that augments the R&D efforts with venture investments, acquisitions, strategic partnerships and startup incubation. Corporate VCs (CVCs) are expected to play a big role in this innovation quest. With that in mind […]
Additional Considerations for Corporate Incubators and Accelerators
In my last post I wrote about corporate incubation/acceleration models, presenting four distinct ones, discussed how to start one of these organizations, and how to increase the value derived from them. In this blog I provide additional details on the topic by: Presenting the criteria and guidelines a corporation should use to start an incubator […]
Using Corporate Incubators and Accelerators To Drive Disruptive Innovation
Corporations are establishing incubators, e.g., Samsung, and accelerators, e.g., Orange, in order to advance their disruptive innovation initiatives. They are doing so on their own, e.g., Samsung, Swisscom, or in partnership with independent accelerators, e.g., Disney, Microsoft, and Barclays have partnered with Techstars. Many corporate incubators and accelerators are established in Silicon Valley, but not […]
IBM-Apple Deal: Mobile Enterprise Applications
On July 15 IBM and Apple announced an exclusive partnership. There are several components to this partnership that have been addressed elsewhere (here and here) but of most interest was the commitment to develop 100 industry-specific mobile analytic applications. As I had written, the broad adoption of smartphones and tablets by employees, customers and partners, […]
In defense of ‘big’
With all due respect to my ‘startup junkie‘ friends, I thought I’d say a few words in defense of big companies. As someone who has spent the majority of my career in small firms, I know firsthand that there is nothing more rewarding or enjoyable than creating something out of nothing and building – and […]
Choosing Between Public and Private Cloud Infrastructures
Since 1999 we have been investing in companies that develop SaaS applications targeting the mid-upper and global enterprise. Through these investments and the hundreds of other SaaS companies, targeting these and other segments, we have considered during this period, we have started to notice a transition in the way companies utilize cloud computing infrastructures platforms […]
SAP Startup Focus in newly industrialised countries
As we have said before here, sustainability job number one is putting bread on the table. To that end, it was great to see SAP’s Startup Focus program take off so well, gaining over 1,000 companies signed up in less than two years. We profiled the Startup Focus program on GreenMonk earlier this year, talking […]
