Given its expertise in marketing and distribution, this is a natural extension of General Mills’ institutional knowledge, much more so than Sand Hill Road stalwarts investing in coffee companies and grilled cheese startups — which is not to say that it will succeed.
Corporate venture capital is, in a sense, getting back to roots, moving beyond its strong association with the technology industry that has come to predominate in recent decades. In doing so it has underlined what corporate venture capital actually is, at its essence: a tool for augmenting a company’s products and strategies, present and future. For many reasons, that often includes Silicon Valley, but it does not mean that CVC is an easy way to access its buzziest technologies.
CVC must be informed by an underlying strategy or differentiator. Have corporate venture capital firms learned the lessons of the tech boom, when they piled in simply because the internet was the shiny new thing? Over time, we’ll learn what companies really had a strategy — and which were merely victims of FOMO.
1. Dushnitsky, Gary. “Corporate Venture Capital in the Twenty First Century: An Integral Part of Firms’ Innovation Toolkit.” D. Cumming (Ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Venture Capital, 2012.↩
2. McNally, Kevin. Corporate Venture Capital: Bridging the Equity Gap in the Small Business Sector, 1997.↩
3. Ibid.↩
4. Ibid.↩
5. Gompers, Paul Allan and Josh Lerner. The Venture Capital Cycle, 2004.↩
6. Ibid.↩
7. Dushnitsky, Gary. “Corporate Venture Capital: Past Evidence and Future Directions.” A. Basu, M. Casson, N. Wadeson, B. Young (Eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Entrepreneurship, 2006.↩
8. Ibid.↩
9. McNally, Kevin. Corporate Venture Capital: Bridging the Equity Gap in the Small Business Sector, 1997.↩
10. Ibid.↩
11. Dushnitsky, Gary. “Corporate Venture Capital in the Twenty First Century: An Integral Part of Firms’ Innovation Toolkit.” D. Cumming (Ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Venture Capital, 2012.↩
12. Dushnitsky, Gary. “Corporate Venture Capital: Past Evidence and Future Directions.” A. Basu, M. Casson, N. Wadeson, B. Young (Eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Entrepreneurship, 2006.↩
13. Romans, Andrew. Masters of Corporate Venture Capital, 2016.↩
14. Ibid.↩
15. Ibid.↩
16. Gompers, Paul Allan and Josh Lerner. The Venture Capital Cycle, 2004.↩
17. Ibid.↩
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