TIM Ventures
TIM Ventures, the corporate venture capital of TIM, is one of the instruments through which TIM carries out open innovation, a distinctive factor of digital innovation.
The business and its rules of play change at an incredible pace. The products and services require continuous research. Talent and competences are fluid.
Therefore, innovation is increasingly a critical factor of success for a business. And in a dynamic, digital context like that in which TIM operates, innovation must be applied using not only internal resources, laboratories and its own in-house R&D departments, but also by seeking assistance from the outside world, taking an “open innovation” approach, to use the expression coined in 2003 by the US economist Henry Chesbrough, who directs the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation of the Berkeley University of California and who has written several books on the matter.
The TIM innovation also involves entrepreneurial open innovation. Investment in digital start- ups in synergy with the TIM business strategy aims to spark and promote a mutually profitable virtuous circle, in which, on the one hand, TIM seeks to make the most of the best innovations of product and service, optimising the time-to-market of the innovation and, on the other, the start-up finds TIM as a subject able to support its development and act as partner and industrial point of reference.
TIM Ventures is the corporate venture capital of TIM, which selects and supports, by investing directly in the risk capital of the best digital start-ups operating in line with the Group’s business strategy. TIM Ventures is currently specialised in investing in the early stages of the start-ups’ activity and development, making minority or “seed” investments and “early stage investments”.
TIM Ventures is part of an extensive network, represented by TIM#Wcap – the TIM business driver – and some of the most important players in the Italian and European VC industry.
“TIM Ventures plays an important role in supporting the best start-ups, in terms of business and social responsibility, helping innovative and making a considerable contribution towards the country’s economic competitiveness and social development”. - TIM With TIM Ventures, was the first in Italy to launch its 2014 corporate venture capital programme, helping boost the ecosystem of Italian and European innovation.
