James D. Hlavacek

Toward More Successful Venture Management

T HE term venture management has been used to describe a wide array of new product and new business start-up activities. In todays large corporations, venture management can be defined as a full-time interdisciplinary team established at either the corporate or divisional level to profitably transfer new technology or new ideas from the laboratory to the marketplace. Previous articles discussed some conceptual foundations of successful venture management at companies such as 3M and DuPont,1 but the historical fact of corporate experience is that few firms have had significant success with this deceptively simple concept. Some firms have had partial success, with many ventures in a state of limbo between success and failure; others have experienced disastrous results.

Learning from Failure: Ten Guidelines for Venture Management

Venture management, which appeared to hold great promise as a means of generating innovative products and businesses internally, has been eagerly embraced and subsequently abandoned by a number of large companies. Executives at these firms often expressed the opinion that venture management was just another blind alley which failed to produce the new sources of revenue and profits its advocates anticipated. A study of twenty-one venture failures in twelve large companies revealed that venture management is in no sense a blind alley but is beset by all the errors that plague the untried and the unfamiliar. Analysis of these obstacles to success identifies the misconceptions responsible for them and suggests ways of steering the fledgling venture around them.