Business, College of
Date of this Version
Summer 7-14-2011
Document Type
Article
Abstract
A single research question motivated this dissertation: How does corporate venture capital investment by a parent firm affect knowledge transfer from the start-up? In answering this question I employed two theoretical foundations. First, drawing on the concept of distant search, I argue that search for external knowledge through CVC investment provides a parent firm with an opportunity to source external knowledge from the start-up. Second, building upon literature on knowledge transfer, I suggest that types of CVC structure facilitate external knowledge transferred from the start-up to a parent firm. Finally, I posit that knowledge attribute of the parent firm improves the parent firm’s ability to source external knowledge from the start-up. Three hypotheses are developed to test these relationships.
Longitudinal data on a panel of 29 large firms in the information communication technology industry covering the period from 1995 to 2005 are used to test these hypotheses. Patent citation is used to measure the level of knowledge transferred from an entrepreneurial firm to a parent firm. Taken together, statistical results of this research provide evidence that the number of CVC investments has an inverted U-shaped relationship with the level of knowledge transferred from the start-up. Both the CVC structure and technological diversity of the parent firm have moderating effects on the relationship between the number of CVC investments and the level of knowledge transferred from the start-up.
Adviser: Sang M. Lee
Comments
A DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of The Graduate College at the University of Nebraska In Partial Fulfillment of Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Major: Interdepartment Area of Business (Management), Under the Supervision of Professor Sang M. Lee. Lincoln, Nebraska: August, 2011
Copyright 2011 Taewan Kim