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Case Study

Fortis Venturing (C): Reaching maturity

By Benoit F. Leleux and Vincent Vliebergh

18 pages

December 2005

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Reference: IMD-3-1545

January 2005: Kris Vander Velpen was wondering how his Venturing unit would fit into Fortis’s Group’s new strategy. Jean-Paul Votron, the new Chief Executive Officer since October 2004, was due to announce a new strategy for the Group that would focus on generating growth. Kris thought that his unit could play a significant role in it. Fortis Venturing was still small in terms of number of people employed or capital invested and it was not contributing materially yet to the Group’s bottom line. Yet, it had established itself within the company; it was generally perceived as having impacted significantly the enterprise’s culture by encouraging people to come up with new ideas and helping develop these into business plans. Some of these ideas could spawn the projects that would eventually broaden Fortis’ activities and support its growth targets. With this new, and yet unspecified, strategy for the Group, Kris was conscious that Fortis Venturing had reached a new critical stage in its development and important decisions needed to be made with respect to its role in the organization and how it operated. Some interesting decisions laid ahead…

Keywords

Corporate Venturing, Change Management, Growth, Financial Services, Venturing, Venture Capital

Settings

Benelux
2005

Type

Field Research

Available Languages

English

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