The “Un-Incubator” vs. the Echo Chamber: Five Questions for New Venture Partners’ Robert Rosenberg

New Venture Partners is a VC firm with a twist: It invests exclusively in corporate spinouts. The firm—which has U.S. offices in San Mateo, CA, and Murray Hill, NJ—counts among its successes Flarion Technologies (bought by Qualcomm), GeoVideo Networks (acquired by Wire One Technologies), and Silicon Hive, a spinout from Philips Electronics that was acquired by Intel in March.

In a two-part interview with Xconomy last summer, New Venture partner David Tennenhouse explained why in-house research projects at large corporations often get stranded—and why many of those ventures make for great spinouts.

How has corporate incubation held up through the recent economic turmoil? And how do those incubators differ from the plethora of venture-funded incubators that have popped up over the last year? Xconomy posed those questions and more to New Ventures East Coast partner Robert Rosenberg.

Rosenberg helped found New Venture Partners in 1997, after a stint as a manager at the Boston Consulting Group. He is currently a director of Real Time Content, ShopWell and TimeSight Systems.

Xconomy: Are large corporations still investing in internal ventures, and if so, are more VC firms getting interested in spinouts?
Robert Rosenberg: There is still a huge amount of R&D in the corporate setting, and it has remained steady through all kinds of economic cycles. It’s intended to foster products that can be used by the mother ship. But sometimes,

Author: Arlene Weintraub

Arlene is an award-winning journalist specializing in life sciences and technology. She was previously a senior health writer based out of the New York City headquarters of BusinessWeek, where she wrote hundreds of articles that explored both the science and business of health. Her freelance pieces have been published in USA Today, US News & World Report, Technology Review, and other media outlets. Arlene has won awards from the New York Press Club, the Association of Health Care Journalists, the Foundation for Biomedical Research, and the American Society of Business Publication Editors. Her book about the anti-aging industry, Selling the Fountain of Youth, was published by Basic Books in September 2010.