Internal Ventures
UC San Diego last week was host to what officials claimed was the first symposium dealing with the latest corporate buzzword: internal venturing, the process of corporations financing the entrepreneurial ideas of their employees rather than the workers starting a firm on their own through outside venture capitalists.
Corporations view their investments in these ventures as equity. “If you get two years into it and you don’t like what you see, then you stop putting money into it,” explained Robert Tuite, manager of new opportunity development at Eastman Kodak.
The company is among the nation’s leaders in this concept, having financed four internal ventures since November. “We have a safety net under the people,” he said. “We’ll take them back into the corporation (if the venture isn’t successful), which is different than the outside world.”
The real down side for these corporate achievers is that, if they fail, “it may be two years out of their careers, and that loss means more to them psychologically than any other type of loss,” Tuite said.
Into Political Ballpark
John Worchester hardly seems the political type. But there he is, chief of staff in County Supervisor Susan Golding’s office.
“I have no political experience,” he conceded. “But she has plenty of political advice; she doesn’t need it from me. I’m here for the administrative end.”
Indeed, this is the fourth high-powered job Worchester has had this decade. He was vice president of marketing for the San Diego Padres until 1982, helping devise the club’s “Get Mad With the Padres” campaign. Then he moved to Daniels Cablevision in Carlsbad as director of corporate communications, and then to Servomation as director of dining services and coordinator of the firm’s construction of facilities at San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium.
Worchester, who has known Golding since 1962 when each was an undergraduate at Carlton College in Northfield, Minn., admits that he is still “on a hell of a learning curve.”
Mainstream Profit
Mainstream, the magazine by and for disabled people, turned 10 years old last month, but, more importantly, it starts its second decade without government assistance and is close to the break-even point.
That’s the word from publisher Cyndi Jones, the one-time Mainstream volunteer who bought the publication last year. Since mid-1982, when its government financing was cut, Mainstream has been a wobbling financial venture at best.
But Jones detects a turnaround. The April issue was profitable and large corporate advertisers are taking a keen interest in her publication, she said. “They are seeing the disabled population as something worth pursuing.”
Expertise Abroad
William Pickett’s fund-raising expertise has him in demand for speeches and seminars around the country. But he is something of an international travel novice, having never ventured any farther than southern Canada or northern Mexico.
That will change in 10 days, as Pickett flies to Nigeria for two weeks to instruct that country’s educators on how to raise money.
There may be a conflict of philosophies, however.
Private universities are outlawed in Nigeria, and Pickett is vice president of university relations at the quite private University of San Diego, where he has increased annual fund raising from $1 million when he started in 1979 to more than $6 million last year.
