The Project
Companies are increasingly using external corporate venturing to learn from knowledge sources beyond the boundary of the firm. External corporate venturing, including corporate venture capital (CVC) investments, alliances, and mergers and acquisitions has been found positively related to the innovation performance of firms and has become a noteworthy vehicle for exploration. We have also noticed that an innovating firm could not only explore new technologies from its corporate venturing partners, but also explore new technologies from the organizations to which the innovating firm has had no prior venturing relationships. When an innovating firm explores beyond the corporate venturing partnerships, the existing corporate venturing partnerships may have impact on the exploratory learning of the innovating firm by acting, for instance, as an information pipe, a reputation reference, or a complementary knowledge source. Although prior studies have greatly contributed to our understanding of the relationship between external corporate venturing and exploration, they have mostly focused on a firm's exploratory learning from its venturing partners (EFP). There has been little insight on how external corporate venturing may affect the exploratory learning beyond the venturing partnerships (EBP). In other words, the extant literature has analyzed in detail the role of external corporate venturing partners with regard to external sources of knowledge, but we know little about how external corporate venturing partnerships could play their roles for an innovating firm to explore technological knowledge embedded in other organizations with which it has no venturing relationships.
The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of external corporate venturing, including corporate venture capital (CVC), alliances and mergers and acquisitions (M&A), on both types of explorative learning Ð EFP and EBP. We focus on corporate venturing relationships that aim at exploring new technological opportunities.
Principal Researchers
Dr. , Dr. Wim Vanhaverbeke (Hasselt Univ. BE) and Dr. Vareska van de Vrande (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne Faculty, Switzerland)
DTU's executive MBA program, MMT, was formally approved by the Danish Ministry of Education in 1997 and approved by EVA (the education ministry's Evaluation Agency) in 2006.