A welcome stab at the lacklustre ROI vs. Strategic Fit dichotomy that motivates many “theories” of corporate venturing: “The Future of Corporate Venturing” by Andrew Campbell et al. in the recent MIT Sloan Management Review. They distinguish four venturing strategies: ecosystem venturing, innovation venturing, harvest venturing and private-equity venturing. Sine qua non, venturing attempts to grow a new billion-dollar leg outside the core business always crash in flames because they lead to endless strategy-changing (i.e. lack of strategy). Instead, companies should ascetically practice the venturing strategy that leverages their market position and assets: thy perseverance shall be rewarded…

Tom Coates notes that our everyday multitasking hassles may be killing off creativity. These thoughts are part of his commentary on the excellent NYT article about iPod and the process of its creation at Apple, which according to the article took only 6-9 months. Tom writes:

The process [of creating the iPod at Apple] seems to me to have been successful in producing something coherent and clean almost because of its brevity. In my experience, three months is about as long as you can reliably expect any individual person to care about their part of the project more than they care about anything else—even if they’re given total free space not to have to think about anything else (multi-tasking is the evil enemy of creativity in my opinion). Only clear delineations between stages in a project (and strong management over those transitions) can really help maintain people’s levels of constructive engagement if you need a project to go any longer.

I agree with Tom that even though multitasking cuts the creative process short, full personal devotion to a single task is always temporary. Tom’s thoughts also made me wonder, is there due appreciation of transitions between exploratory multitasking and focused concentration in companies? My feeling is that those who manage innovation should encourage their people to make such transitions—meaning really moving physically—from a focused setting to a multitasking setting and back again. (These musings link to some other thoughts about “critical transitions”).

Venture capitalists are hurting and having worked for one, personally I don’t feel particular sympathy toward the industry as long as it disregards the idea of “use value” and continues to operate on pure greed. When I say greediness is bad I don’t mean you should give up your allowance or start acting like David in Nick Hornby’s How to Be Good. What I mean is that a focus purely on the market value (exchange value) of the firm and a disregard for the effects of its products on people’s quality of life is practically and morally unsustainable. Recently some venture capitalists have started to look into debt financing instead of equity financing. Writes Mike on Techdirt: having debt makes you much more focused on succeeding, since you have the pressure to make the interest payments. It really helps to focus and motivate you. For a while now I’d been wondering why companies always look to raise venture capital instead of taking on loans. The obvious answer is that a capital investment doesn’t need to be paid back like a loan. Exchange-value focus seems built into the very structure of equity financing. I wonder if other forms of financing might direct the focus towards a more balanced approach? Here’s a Red Herring article on the VC turn to debt financing.