Join Professor Wim Vanhaverbeke and Jonathon Gold at one of the following venues:

6th July: Cambridge | 7th July: Oxford | 8th July: Edinburgh (All Workshops will start at 9am and finish at 5pm)

An Exclusive Workshop on How to Better Finance and Manage Your Innovation.

The focus of the day is to show how traditional and new techniques for financing innovation can be combined to deliver a more successful, balanced and ‘open’ approach to managing NPD projects.

The three key elements that will make up the day are:

OPEN INNOVATION

Covering why Open Innovation is an increasingly adopted mechanism for managing risk in theinnovation process and how you can learn from (and work with) vanguard innovators who are evolving new methods for sharing the burden of resourcing entrepreneurial opportunities.

RAISING FINANCE
Addressing the growing challenge of commercialising technology projects and getting technology to Market more quickly.

CONSTELLATION CREATION
Looking at how the two core themes for the day are coming together in industry. (i.e. how brand owners in large organisations are increasingly extending both the scope and reach of their corporate venturing activities towards ambitious SME’s).

SESSION 1
OPEN INNOVATION

With Professor Wim Vanheverbeke. What are the (untold) decision making challenges that face management today?

This session will focus on why greater use of ‘shared’ risk, finance and expertise is being applied to many innovation programmes (i.e. Collaborations with value chains; Partnership agreements with existing / new suppliers and even; More frequent engagements with the Venture Capital community to achieve growth objectives faster).

An introduction to the principles and increasing growth of Open Innovation as a defined business strategy. This lecture, led by a world expert will look at recent developments and successes from Vanguard Innovators and why Open Innovation is as relevant for small firms and start ups as it is for large industrial companies.

KEY TOPICS COVERED
» Matching external finance with OEM money
» Corporate Entrepreneurship
» Trends in Corporate Venturing
» OI as a method for securing exit routes for SME’s

SESSION 2
RAISING FINANCE

With Jonathon Gold

Venture capital (VC) is often the only realistic form of private finance available to help start and grow innovative businesses, and 40 years of statistics show that businesses in receipt of venture capital grow faster than ones that don't seek or attract this type of finance.

However competition for this flexible form of investment is now intense and, as technology based companies looking to exploit opportunities at while you have competitive advantage, you need to understand how the process works. If you don’t stand out, you wont stand a chance. In a purposely pragmatic session, we will explore VC as a whole but also how it has been used by corporations who are actively seeking partners and to attract innovation. It will cover the basics of how various types of funds operate as well as focusing on real learning that will help you stay ahead of the pack.

KEY TOPICS COVERED
» Achieving Proof of Concept Funding
» Attracting investment capital, debt or equity
» Concept and seed capital investment
» Direct Investments and Corporate Financing
» Business planning
» Bidding for finance
» Managing Technology Projects
» Financing Product Portfolio expansion


SESSION 3
CONSTELLATION CREATION

With Professor Wim Vanheverbeke & Jonathon Gold Starting with a short lecture, this session looks at wrapping up the lessons from the day, by focusing on some of the core topics identified as relevant to the audience, i.e:

• How to cope with development inefficiencies in technology driven markets
• Developing new ways to finance innovation projects through collaboration and sharing of risks
• Innovating differently (for example by finding new ways to transfer technologies from non-competitive industries or working as partners to monetise largely untapped patent repositiories from big companies).

It will focus on ‘Where is Your Business?’ and real take-away‘s what that can help you organise for success.
This session will conclude with group / roundtable discussions and a Q&A session with the presenters. It will be driven by some core concern, problem and opportunity areas that have been raised by delegates or identified by speakers throughout the course of the day.

EXAMPLE TOPICS (ACTUAL TOPICS WILL BE DEFINED ON THE DAY BY DELEGATES)
» How a small, high tech firm can co-operate with a large technology user firm
» How to achieve growth objectives faster
» Venturing to suit your scale
» External acquisition strategies
» Structural planning

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ABOUT THE WORKSHOP LEADERS

Professor Wim Vanhaverbeke is an author, Co-Founder of Exnovate (the European Network of Excellence on Open & Collaborative Innovation) and Professor of Strategy & Innovation at the Hasselt University (Belgium) in the Department of Business Studies. He is also Visiting Professor "Open Innovation" at Vlerick School of Management in Leuven & Gent (Belgium) and ESADE Business School (Spain). His current research areas are: alliances and acquisition of external technological capabilities, managing and organizing open innovation in large and small companies, and the role of intermediaries in open innovation.

Wim has published papers in the international journals of Organization Science and Organization Studies, Research Policy and the Journal of Business Venturing Journal of Management Studies, and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, and Strategic Organization.

Jonathan Gold is the Chief Executive and creator of Finance Tree. He is a specialist on investment readiness, proof of concept and seed finance. His current activities include building investment structures for new funds and business support initiatives as well as advising companies seeking investment finance. He has established several early stage seed capital and venture funds attracting £19m capital from public and private sources for investment in small companies and academic spin-out companies. As part of this he produced the structures for several seed capital funds such as the Cascade Seed Fund (around Surrey university) and the original £4m Rainbow Seed Fund where he built the consortia of Government Laboratories and went on to manage part of the fund operations. He also served as the Chief Executive of NorthStar Equity Investors, for its first year of operation, overseeing the creation and establishment of the £10m Proof of Concept Fund and a £23m Co-Investment Fund.


ATTEND AND LEARN

Why some companies are successfully commercialising technological innovations faster while many others are not. How to attract venture capital to your own projects and how to set up alliances with VC backed start-ups. New strategies for attracting ideas to you by setting up or improving the track record of your own Corporate Venture Capital department / fund. How to jointly create value with innovation partners in a constellation and ensure that each partner is set up to capture value.

THE WORKSHOP VENUES

6th July
Murray Edwards Conference Suite, Cambridge University
Murray Edwards College, Huntingdon Road, Cambridge, CB3 0DF, UK

7th July
Crown Packaging UK plc
Downsview Road, OX12 9BP Wantage, Oxfordshire, UK

8th July
Wolfson Microelectronics, Edinburgh
Westfield House, 26 Westfield Road, Edinburgh, EH11 2QB, UK