Governing Innovation: How Governance Factors Affect the Relationship Between CVC Investments and Firm Innovation
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2025-07-08
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en
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This thesis assesses how governance factors influence the relationship between corporate venture capital (CVC) investments and firm innovation. With CVC being widely recognized as a strategic mechanism for firms to access external knowledge and thereby boost innovation, the conditions under which it leads to preferable innovation outcomes remain inconclusive. Building on literature from knowledge creation and the upper echelons theory, this study examines the moderating role of ownership stake and CEO characteristics, specifically CEO age, tenure and educational level. The analysis was done applying a fixed effects panel regression on an unbalanced panel dataset, consisting of 1.840 global firms across 25.368 firm-year observations between 2002-2024. The results confirm that an increase in CVC investments is positively associated with an increase in patenting output. Furthermore, younger and shorter-tenured CEOs significantly strengthen this relationship, while ownership stake and CEO educational level do not affect the relationship. This contributes to theory by not only strengthening the established relationship between CVC and innovation, but also by adding to it by explaining how CEO characteristics play an important role in shaping the success of this relationship. For practitioners, the findings suggest that innovation-seeking firms should consider the role of the CEO within CVC and focus on building high-quality interactions with firms, rather than increasing ownership. The insights of this study are therefore relevant for both scholars and practitioners.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen