Here I am basically translating Enrique's work:
"Business Week discusses about the return of a trend that used to be popular not long time ago: the roll of the corporations acting as Venture Capital Investors providing seed capital for start-ups, sometimes in exchange for high-priority rights of acquisition.
This is, in fact, an R&D outsourcing approach: Corporations outsource certain R&D projects and supervise their developments.
Although the article names Google in the title, in fact it also speaks about other companies, which totally injected about 1300 million US dollars in about 390 financing agreements during first half of the 2007, an increase of 30% in comparison to 2006.
Companies like Intel, which has a long term tradition in this approach, Motorola, Novartis, Johnson & Johnson, Cisco, Qualcomm or Yahoo! are offering start-ups an alternative route to Sand Hill Road (a street with a notable concentration of VC companies). One of the reasons is avoiding to have to buy later much more expensive.
However companies as Dell or Boeing have completely stopped funding start-ups after the experience of the late nineties. Others, like IBM, Microsoft or HP have reduced their performances in this sense. "
This approach of outsourcing R&D is nothing new. It is described in many books. I read "The Valuation of technology" by Peter Boer. He describes very well this phenomenon from a historic perspective
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I have read a very interesting post in the 
