In 2012, one of us – Gregor Gimmy, a California-based serial entrepreneur and former IDEO consultant – accepted a new role at BMW’s corporate R&D headquarters. Gimmy’s task was clear, but highly demanding: to reimagine the way BMW innovates with startups. The prevalent model of startup cooperation in recent years has been corporate venture capital and accelerators (CVC&As). Between 2012 and 2015, the number of global CVC deals almost doubled and their investments quadrupled to $29.1 billion. However all this corporate venturing doesn’t seem to be accomplishing strategic innovation goals. In recent years, many high-profile companies including Volkswagen, Yahoo, Turner/Warner Bros, and Coca-Cola have shuttered their VC arms or accelerators entirely. In fact, in 2011, BMW had also founded a corporate venture capital unit, called BMW iVentures, but it exclusively invested in service startups. His time in Silicon Valley had shown Gimmy that Corporate VCs and accelerators struggle to lure the best startups from private venture capitalists. Gimmy’s insight was that the key to improving corporate co-innovation is not for companies to compete more effectively with private venture capitalists or accelerators, but to focus on what they can offer to top startups that others cannot. Startups require three things to grow: capital, coaching, and clients. Private VCs and other professional investors can provide the first two. But only large corporates can offer the last one.

This case illustrates how Duke''s Fuqua School of Management, located in Durham, North Carolina, has expanded its management education programs into Europe through the extensive usage of Internet technology. The learning objectives are: (1) to gain knowledge of how the international market for management education has changed over the past years and to recognize threats and opportunities for existing and new players; (2) to understand how Internet technology can be used for internationalizing existing "old" businesses, i.e. the management education market, depending on the specific requirements of different target groups; (3) to recognize the opportunities that the Internet offers for existing competitors, such as Fuqua, who are currently not number one or two in their respective industry; (4) to understand how the Internet usage for the development and delivery of management education programs necessitates the co-operation between universities and technology providers and/or education brokers; and (5) to acquire a firm grasp of a number of e-commerce analysis tools.