As a Fortune 100 company, our corporate venture arm invests in later stage deals. However, we also need to invest in early discovery from academia and early startups. How can we extend our reach?

However, we have a funding gap in addressing truly disruptive technologies that are in seed or nascent stages, stemming from either academic research or early stage start up companies. How do we mine important early stage opportunities?

Product and technology innovation are increasingly distributed globally, and market leading organizations need to look outside of their internal R&D function for sources of new technology innovation. This concept, known as ‘Open Innovation’ is adopted widely by some of the most successful life science companies in the industry. An essential tool for pursuing an open innovation model is to develop and implement a viable technology scouting function. Technology scouting is a search and intermediation process directed at uncovering important, strategically aligned opportunities that often reside ‘under the radar’ of formal business development organizations.

SI served as an extension of our client company’s technology scouting, assessment and business development teams, and managed the client’s seed stage investments on the West Coast of the United States, for a span of 5 years. In this process, SI reviewed and evaluated between 800 to 1000 opportunities per year, to evaluate their strategic relevance/impact to the businesses of SI’s client, overall technical merit, market potential, strength of management team, strength of IP, and the unmet needs addressed. Through this process, SI was able to identify and present 3-4 opportunities per year for seed stage investments by SI’s client company, creating a significant portfolio of high potential, early stage strategic opportunities. Many of these opportunities grew to become significant and important developers of innovative technology offerings in their respective market segment, and some were ultimately acquired by SI’s client.