Strategic growth trough corporate venture capital activities: investment focus and strategies - empirical evidence

Abstract

Well-established corporations relied more and more on open innovation approach such as

the corporate venture capital in order to identify new business opportunities outside their

boundaries. The pursuit of new business opportunities is an important source of value

creation and competitive advantages in terms of technology and market. The main

objectives of using such approach are strategic and aim at complementing in-house

research and development, developing synergy with existing business units, enabling new

value creation from collaborations with emerging venture-backed companies and

facilitating corporate changes, future growth and expansion on emerging markets. We

identified four main CVC investment focus and strategies: focus on (1) exploring new

technologies vs. (2) exploiting existing technologies or on (3) exploring new markets vs.

(4) developing existing markets. We additionally analyze the factors that may influence

the choice of the above-mentioned CVC investment focus and strategies.