3. Venture capital

Venture capital was invented by Georges Doriot (figure 2 ), a Frenchman best known in the USA, but who was also behind INSEAD. In 1946, he created AR (American Research and Development), with funds from MIT. The emergence of this new profession was a response to the emergence of new companies, based on R, offering innovations to the market. It was a necessary complement to the traditional banking system, which was unable to finance projects that were too risky: the idea was to finance something for which there was no guarantee of repayment.

His most famous investment was in 1957 in Digital Equipment, a company founded by Ken Olsen, an MIT engineer who developed the first transistor...