Corporate Venturing: Creating New Businesses Within the Firm by Zenas Block and Ian C. MacMillan

The authors offer hundreds of practical insights on managing ventures from both the corporate and venture perspective.

The principal purpose of this book is to present concrete management practices that have proven to be effective in creating new businesses and have helped foster innovation within existing businesses. How do established firms innovate? One way is through corporate venturing-turning a good idea into a viable business or successfully commercializing its technology. In Corporate Venturing, Block and MacMillan provide a masterful blueprint that can help managers in any company, regardless of size, plan the highly uncertain activity of starting a new business. Executives will learn how to encourage entrepreneurship, identify venture opportunities and locate them within the firm, select venture managers, set up planning mechanisms, and evaluate venture experiences.

The authors offer hundreds of practical insights on managing ventures, from both the corporate and venture perspectives, including:

For companies that want to use innovation to drive business success -- and the managers who will lead them -- there is no better place to start than Corporate Venturing.

I found the book useful when I set up a new profit center and business within a small construction management company. Most important for me is that it helped me understand some of the political dynamics I would be encountering in dealing with the parent: at startup and, in my situation, as a consumer of parent company services.

The book is academic in the best sense of the word: it presents the big issues and context. It's basically a model of the factors and forces involved. It is not a cookbook or a how to and is short on anecdotal experience. Nevertheless, the contents cover all the key dimensions: Getting Started, Framing and Managing the Venture Process, Identifying, Evaluating, and Selecting Opportunity; Selecting, Evaluating, and Compensating Venture Management; Locating the Venture in the Organization; Developing the Business Plan; Organizing the Venture; Controlling the Venture; A Survival Guide for Venture Managers; The Internal Politics of Venturing; Learning from Experience.

Very practical book on elements of corporate venturing - that is, generating ventures and nurturing them within a firm. Not one of those silly business-popular psych books. These guys don't care if giants can dance or not.

The authors offer a blueprint that will help managers in any company design and manage corporate ventures. Executives will learn how to foster entrepreneurship, identify venture opportunities and locate them within the firm, select venture managers, set up planning and control mechanisms, and understand the political interplay between the venture and the firm.

Authors provide a masterful blueprint that will help managers in any company, regardless of size, plan the highly uncertain activity of starting a new business. Paper. DLC: Entrepreneurship.

"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. For practitioners, 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.

Zenas Block was Adjunct Professor of the Executive MBA Program at the Stern School of Business, NYU before his retirement in 2001. He had also been a Clinical Professor of Management from 1984 to 1992 in the full time MBA Program.

Ian C. MacMillan is the Director of the Saul C. Snider Entrepreneurial Center and George W. Taylor Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies at Wharton. He joined the Center in June 1986, after having served as the Director of Entrepreneurial Studies at New York University.

Preface		ix
Introduction		1
1.	Corporate Venturing: What Is It? Why Do It?	13
2.	Getting Started	33
3.	Framing and Managing the Venturing Process	69
4.	Identifying, Evaluating, and Selecting Opportunity	93
5.	Selecting, Evaluating and Compensating Venture Management	113
6.	Locating the Venture in the Organization	147
7.	Developing the Business Plan	161
8.	Organizing the Venture	195
9.	Controlling the Venture	231
10.	A Survival Guide for Venture Managers	257
11.	The Internal Politics of Venturing	283
12.	Learning from Experience	309
APPENDIX A: Abstracts of Some Investigations of Corporate Venturing		327
APPENDIX B: Venturing with Corporate Venture Capital		339
Index		365