Potential of Hands-On Venture Capital for Space-Related Growth Companies

Abstract

Venture capital with its capabilities is an appropriate instrument towards commercialization. While billions of dollars of equity are invested in tens of thousands of young and mostly technology-oriented companies each year, the space community is still struggling with fairly unsuccessful commercialization efforts. Two major reasons have caused this dilemma: the lack of interaction and communication with the business world, and missing skills among the players in the space community to push the desired development to realize a reasonable number of fully commercial activities. Being in the international venture capital business for nearly twenty years, and being familiar with the space sector, GENES has, after intensive analyses, decided to develop in co-operation with the relevant players space-related venture capital to support a real commercialization process in space. However, the experience so far has shown that the space community must first do the necessary homework as well as make visibile commitments. the requirements for the involvement of venture capital in space are given, and two pilot programs are suggested. the first is a focused educational approach to generate and ensure the ability to understand and communicate business, and the second is the setting-up of a specially tailored international venture capital fund for space. the overall goal of such activities is to relieve the budgets in the long term, and to create jobs by generating sustainable businesses which will profit space, the investors and the economy.