Although Intel seeks a return on its invested capital, it is primarily
concerned about achieving the strategic objectives it negotiated into the
term sheet. This is an imperfect solution to a difficult problem: Corporate
venture investing should be driven by strategic goals, instead of
purely financial goals. Yet strategically driven investments are inherently
much harder to evaluate and measure quantitatively than financially
driven investments. Intel’s approach at least addresses one potential
problem with evaluating the performance of a strategic investment,
namely, the tendency to retrospectively redefine the goals of the investment
so that the actual performance is considered more favorably than it
should be. This retroactive redefinition moves the goalposts by removing
the anchor that formed the basis for the investment in the first place.
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But even Intel cannot answer the key question one would ideally want to
ask about its corporate venture investments: How much did Intel’s sales
and profits increase as a result of its corporate venture investments?