Over the past decades, well established firms have understood the importance of opening up their innovation process and secure technologies residing outside their boundaries, thus resulting in their growing interest for Corporate Venture Capital. Allegedly, they invest in CVC to obtain strategic and/or financial benefits. However the concrete interplay between these two seemingly opposite objectives has remained a contentious issue. As an attempt to fill in this gap, this book empirically addresses the confrontation between financial and strategic objectives and analyses their impact on CVC characteristics, processes and performance.
Most European incumbent firms invest primarily for strategic reasons, however always keeping financial analytics into perspectives. That is, parent firms first screen venture proposals for strategic rationales and when a strategic fit is determined, they use methods analogous to independent venture capitalists to assess financial metrics.
In regard to strategic objectives, it is noted that incumbent firms invest predominantly to gain a window on new technologies, to achieve new market opportunities and to acquire differentiation advantages. Final results brought to conclusion that strategic investors seek to expose themselves to recent disruptive inventions and trend setting technologies, so as to complement their core business and boost their innovative capacity. Furthermore, they endeavor to access resources that accelerate their entry into new markets and expose themselves to additional growth opportunities.
On the other hand financial investors attempt to exploit their superior industry knowledge to select valuable ventures, so as to improve their revenues and value of portfolio companies. From a reductive point of view, strategic investors seek to exploit synergies between themselves and the new venture, while financial investors seek to exploit independent profits in the venture itself. As a result, for companies pursuing both objectives, the short-term concordance between them is questionable and can develop into friction.
For instance, incumbent firms sharing a strategic fit, an operational link and/or a complementarity with their ventures, experience greater increase in their innovation rate. As financial investors do not seek to acquire innovative capabilities through CVC investments, they do not invest in these links. Conversely, strategic investors actively invest in these linkages and develop channels to exchange information with ventures in order to create an enhanced basis for critical strategic spillovers. However, this requires long-term investments and usually undermines short-term financial returns sought by financial investors. A company strongly focusing on both objectives would then be confronted with a dilemma.
As divergent these orientations may be on the short run, when incorporated in sound long-term strategies, they can offer tremendous complementarities. In Europe, nine incumbent firms out of ten pursue venture strategies that include both, financial and strategic objectives. Further, results showed that CVC firms were extremely successful at leveraging venture technologies and at obtaining financial returns at the same time. This is not to say that, in the long run, a strategic investments’ finality is to produce financial added value.
The example depicted above is one of the many analyzed in this research. Further impacts of program objectives on CVC investments have been illustrated, most notably, on the venture’s selection process, on the incumbent firm’s relationship with the ventures, on investment obstacles and on the performance of ventures.
To conclude, the successful application of CVC investments involves a dynamic, ever changing combination of both strategic and financial objectives. Both are interrelated in structure and application. Furthermore, they are by no means mutually exclusive and offer complementary investment strategies. However, strategically oriented investments convey synergies with ventures, additional stability and growth opportunities. Consequently, a greater emphasis on strategic objectives is advised, as it generates positive externalities beyond strict financial returns. Results depict European CVC companies.