Collectively, the authors have spent more than 25 years studying the corporate venturing process in companies as diverse as Citigroup, DuPont, 3M, Swiss Re and Microsoft. In this study, one of the authors dedicated two full-time years of dissertation research in an attempt to understand a phenomenon that is often alluded to, but seldom explicitly studied: namely, given how failure-prone the venturing process is, can it nonetheless add value? During the two years, we had full access to individuals, documents and meetings that covered a four-year period of Nokia’s experiences in venturing. What we learned in some cases echoed successful patterns of venturing that we have observed elsewhere. With Nokia, however, we did uncover some