Jj Napp

Corporate Venture Capital Investments for Enhancing Innovation: Challenges and Solutions

OVERVIEW: Corporate venture capital investments are a powerful tool to explore and exploit innovative opportunities with start-up companies. Successfully implementing a corporate venturing program presents a number of challenges, from setting the right mixture of strategic goals and operational implementation to measuring outcomes and capturing value. Working from a series of nine case studies of corporate venturing units in large corporations, this article examines the challenges and presents practical solutions drawn from detailed analysis of the case studies.

Chapter 13 Implementing Open Innovation: Challenges in Linking Strategic and Operational Factors for Large Firms Working with HTSFs

Innovation is an increasingly distributed process, involving networks of geographically dispersed players with a variety of possible, and dynamic, value chain configurations (Fraser, Minshall, & Probert, 2005). ‘Open innovation’ is one term that has emerged to describe ‘[…] the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively’ (Chesbrough, Vanhaverbeke, & West, 2006). This is contrasted with the ‘closed’ model of innovation where firms typically generate their own ideas which they then develop, produce, market, distribute and support.

External corporate venture capital investment: Towards a framework for capturing and measuring strategic value

This paper presents the initial results of on-going research in the field of external Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) investments, i.e. equity investments of large corporations in entrepreneurial ventures which originated outside the corporation. The research is motivated by the fact that external CVC plays an increasingly important role within the strategy of corporations. Driven by a general trend towards a more open approach to innovation, companies see particular value in external corporate venturing as a tool to gain, for example, access to complementary technologies and a general window on technology developments. The review of literature in the field of external corporate venturing clearly reveals that theoretical gaps exist in understanding mechanisms for capturing value and measurements of this value. To help close these gaps, the research addresses the underlying question “How do corporations and start-ups capture and measure strategic value through external CVC investments” by using embedded, multiple case studies. Following an initial set of case studies, steps towards the development of a framework for capturing and measuring strategic value from CVC investments are outlined within this paper and the resulting preliminary framework is presented. The paper closes with an outlook on ongoing and future research steps.