In his new book Capturing New Markets: How Smart Companies Create Opportunities Others Don't (McGraw-Hill; June 2011), business strategist Stephen Wunker attempts to offer senior executives a practical guide to taking their companies to the next level -- by taking advantage of uncharted markets. An entrepreneur and strategy consultant with degrees from Princeton, Columbia, and Harvard Business School, Wunker leads Boston-based consultancy New Market Advisors. The firm's work in helping clients with new-markets strategies is based on Wunker's long-time collaboration with Harvard Business School professor and disruptive-innovation expert Clayton Christensen.

He speaks with CFOworld's Lisa Yoon about the CFO's role in future and developing corporate ventures.

Companies have emerged from the Great Recession. And a lot of them have a lot of cash on their books, but they don't have a clear formula for growth. One way they can go about growth is just by acquiring competitors. But there's a lot of research that shows that, ultimately, those acquisitions don't really create good returns for shareholders.

If companies want to go about organic growth, they need to take different approaches from what they used to take, particularly given all the discontinuities in the environment, given the recession, globalization, new technologies, and so on. New markets are an important way to capture the upside of turbulence and change while protecting companies from the downside.