GOOD AT OPENING DOORS

Walt Disney Co. (DIS) can fire up one of Hollywood's best-oiled marketing machines to promote Hannah Montana or High School Musical. But when it comes to one of its latest profit centers, Steamboat Ventures, the media giant dials down the publicity. Located in a nondescript building two miles from Disney's Burbank headquarters, the $575million venture capital firm has quietly nurtured 25 startups in an aggressive effort to seed new ideas.

Taking cues from technology companies like Intel (INTC) and Qualcomm, Disney launched its own in-house VC fund in 2000 to find emerging entrepreneurs and products in media. It wasn't good timing. All around, dot-coms were imploding. The idea, though, was sound, and now other industry players are following Disney. Last year, NBC Universal started a similar vehicle, hiking its size from $250 million to $1 billion in April. "Media has become a hot area," says Paul Kedrosky, a senior fellow at think tank Kauffman Foundation. "Disney just got there first."

Named after Steamboat Willie, the 1928 Mickey Mouse cartoon, Steamboat operates like a traditional VC fund. John Ball, who used to head up Disney's corporate development group, and his team scour conferences and work the phones, looking for media startups in the U.S. and China with promising products, technologies, or services into which they can plow $2 million to $15million. Once they decide to invest, a team member will often join the company's board or make hiring suggestions. After buying a piece of Move Networks last year, Steamboat pushed the streaming video firm to get a new chief financial officer, which it did.

By design, Steamboat keeps an arm's-length distance from its parent, maintaining its own legal and public-relations teams. Although Disney executives have oversight through a six-person committee that includes Disney CEO Robert A. Iger and CFO Thomas O. Staggs, they have yet to overrule an investment idea. "We decided that if we were going to get into the VC business, we had to do it in a way that looked, smelled, and behaved like a disciplined venture capitalist," says Ball. Translation: The team members, who get a percentage of the fund's returns, had to be free to swing for the fences without Disney second-guessing them.


Of course, being part of Disney has its benefits. Steamboat sometimes taps Disney executives to help scout investment opportunities. It called on folks from the theme parks' retail crew to help vet Pure Digital Technologies, which makes disposable digital cameras. Disney used its hit ABC (DIS) show Ugly Betty to promote the scrapbook site Scrapblog, a Steamboat investment. "They're really good at opening doors for you," says Michael Yavonditte, the former CEO of online ad company Quigo Technologies, another holding.

It hasn't always gone smoothly. The fund lost money on photo restoration service PhotoTLC, which shut down in March. In October the fund cut ties with Industrious Kid after a disagreement over how much merchandise its social-networking site, imbee.com, would sell; the tech firm didn't want to be too commercial.

So far, though, the hits appear to outnumber the misses. Disney says it made $37 million on an estimated $6 million investment in Quigo, which AOL bought in November. Steamboat also made money on a stake in flat-panel display maker Iridigm Display; (QCOM) the entire company was sold to Qualcomm (QCOM) for $188 million. Overall, Steamboat's first $75 million fund is expected to return at least $150 million, according to sources familiar with it. That's a middling return in the VC world but not bad for a fund started in the depths of the last bust. And as it often does with box-office hits, Disney has sequels in the works: It's pouring money into a $200 million U.S. fund and planning another focused on Europe.

Activity Based Performance Appraisal

In a typical corporate environment, one has to get things done through interaction with a number of people from various internal departments. Though your work depends on contributions from multiple heads, only a few directly report to you and many don't even indirectly report to you. Sometimes situations become tricky when pleading, badgering, threatening, cajoling, praying, etc. don't seem to work. The only respite in such situations is escalating the matter higher up with possible onset of another set of problems like departmental blame game resulting in even more friction in intra-department working relationship. Is there a way out from this dilemma?
Take an example of a Brand Manager. He has to interact with various internal departments like sales, R&D, finance, packaging, and purchase over which he has hardly any direct or indirect control. Yet the poor guy is expected to get things done (after all he is the CEO of his brand) by playing hard-ball or soft-ball with all these agencies. Sometimes things move smoothly while many times too much heat gets generated from friction. Personal egos emerge and personal agendas come. Yet, like Titan, he is expected to slaughter all obstacles. This poor guy's life would be much easier if the people he regularly interacts with have some proportion of their performance appraisal based on how they help this brand manager achieve his goal. What I am talking about is - Activity Based Performance Appraisal (ABPA). Wow, it seems I have coined something fancy and hopefully useful!
So, what happens in Activity Based Performance Appraisal? Let's see using the same Brand Manager example. For the sake of illustration, let's assume that six people are in play – Brand Manager, Packaging Development guy, R&D guy, Finance guy, Purchase guy, and sales guy. Typically, a brand manager would be handling one brand while guys from packaging development, R&D, Finance, Purchase, and Sales would be working on many brands (say, 5 brands).
In this example of Activity Based Performance Appraisal (ABPA), 50% performance appraisal of the Brand Manager would be done by the guys from packaging development, R&D, finance, purchase, and sales while the balance 50% would be appraised by his immediate boss. Similarly, 50% of performance appraisal of guys from packaging development, R&D, finance, purchase, and sales would be decided by various Brand Managers for whose brands they work in the ratio of time spent on each brand while balance 50% of performance appraisal would be done by their immediate supervisors based on quality of their work related to their technical area.
Of course this is just an idea. For making it work, it would need company specific judgement and refinement. But once implemented, Activity Based Performance Appraisal (ABPA) would ensure that no one takes the other for granted. Things would move smoothly and lesser degree of follow-up would be required to get things done. Democracy will come to organizations!

The Innovation Value Chain

In this article written by Morten T. Hansen and Julian Birkinshaw, it's depicted that how managing innovation is like a series of steps that need to be arduously followed.

Managers need to take an end-to-end view of their innovation efforts, pinpoint their particular weaknesses, and tailor innovation best practices as appropriate to address the defi ciencies.


The innovation value chain composes of three main phases of innovation:
Idea Generation (for ideas inside your unit; looking for them in other units; looking for them externally)
Conversion (selecting ideas; funding them;)
Diffusion (promoting and spreading ideas companywide).
Managers can pinpoint their weakest links and tailor innovation best practices appropriately to strengthen those links. Companies typically succumb to one of three broad "weakest-link" scenarios. They are idea poor, conversion poor, or diffusion poor.


Rarely do executives examine their company's innovativeness--the capacity to conceive, develop, roll out, and improve new offerings--as a whole.


Read the full article here. Do share your comments on innovation value chains of leading firms.