USA: UNITED STATES of AMERICA: Market Leadership, Ventures, Entrepreneurship (Ten3 Global Business Learning Report

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Why Venture Strategies?

Venture strategies are the key source of the corporate top-line growth. Durable corporate venture strategies include internal investment in innovation, new product/service development, and in-company ventures, new business creation though spinouts, and external venture investing in new technologies and emerging markets.

The most successful companies are those that have developed aggressive venture strategies and have made ventures critical components of their strategic and operating success. For today's corporations, traditional internal expansions, efficiency improvements and "synergistic" acquisitions are no longer sufficient sources of growth in most industry segments that had grown crowded and hypercompetitive. The new challenge is to search for emerging "white space" opportunities, new-business creations that would meet the unmet, unserved needs of customers in emerging markets.

In ventures, large and midsized companies can discover a source of growth they are striving to achieve. New business creation has become central to achieving strategic and financial objectives of market champions. "Silicon Valley wouldn't exist if big companies couldn't identify technology and market opportunities and move with speed to capitalize on them", says Mike Moritz of Sequoia Capital Partners.

Changing Mindset

Source: "Venture Catalyst", Donald L. Laurie, 2001

Many companies may need to change their mindset to achieve growth through venture strategies. These companies should:

• redefine their concept of organization and expand their capacity for speed

• alter their need for control

• develop unwillingness to settle for mediocre results and develop ability to seek out the discontinuities, whether they crop up in technology or in the markets

• broaden their tolerance for failures and modify their risk profile

• shift some of their investment capital from incremental internal research-and-development projects to internal and external ventures.

The Five Critical Success Factors for New Ventures

By Peter Drucker

1.A focus on the market

2.Financial foresight, especially in planning for cashflow and capital needs ahead

3.Building a top management team long before the new venture actually needs one and long before it can actually afford one

4.A decision by the founding entrepreneur in respect of his or her own role, area of work, and relationship

5.For in-company ventures in an established business, insulating the new venture

The Four Entrepreneurial Strategies

By Peter Drucker

1.Being "the Fastest and the Mostest" - the "greatest gamble", aiming from the beginning at permanent leadership

2."Hitting Them Where They Ain't" - either by "creative imitation"; or by "entrepreneurial judo", a Japanese concept that enables newcomers to catapult themselves into a leadership position against entrenched, established companies

3.Finding and occupying a specialized "ecological niche" - obtaining a practical monopoly in a small area

4.Changing the economic characteristics of the product, a market, or an industry - by creating utility, or pricing, or adaptation to the customer's social and economic reality, or delivering what represents true value to the customer.

Market Focus

Selling is not about content, it is about fit. The analysis of the market potential and search for the right fit separates the inventor from the entrepreneur. What makes a venture succeed is the ability to identify emerging attractive markets and to seize on unmet, unserved customer needs. Successful business is ruled not by the founders' decisions, but by the marketplace. And the marketplace, in turn, is ruled by "fears and passions". People will only buy what they want to buy, or are afraid not to buy. And these "fears and passions" change every day.