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Innovation at the interface: A congurational approach to
corporate venture capital
Magnus Schückes
a,*
, Benedikt Unger
b
, Tobias Gutmann
c
, Gerwin Fels
d
a
University of Mannheim, Institute for SME Research and Entrepreneurship, L 9,1-2, 68161 Mannheim, Germany
b
Free University of Bozen –Bolzano, Italy
c
EBS Universit¨
at, Germany
d
Technical University of Berlin, Germany
ARTICLE INFO
JEL classication:
M13
L21
L22
O32
Keywords:
Corporate venture capital
Entrepreneurial nance
Neo-congurational approach
Fuzzy-set QCA
ABSTRACT
This study explores how corporate venture capital (CVC) units can be congured to effectively
achieve innovation performance and succeed amidst the tensions they face at the intersection of
the corporate and venture domain. Using a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) of
30 dedicated CVC investment arms, we analyze how successful units congure their internal
arrangements in response to these tensions and generate various innovation outcomes for their
parent organizations. We identify four different solutions for effective CVC unit congurations,
highlighting that explorative and exploitative innovation success require different setups.
Moreover, we nd that more mature and explorative CVC units distance themselves via buffering
from their corporate sponsor, while at the same time increasing their efforts to maintain delib-
erate connections via bridging to representatives of the very same corporate environment they
stem from. For ambidextrous CVC units, a more dynamic setup that allows corporate leadership to
selectively initiate collaboration with the corporate core when benecial while facilitating
distancing at other times proved successful. Our study contributes new evidence and theory on
how CVC units can navigate tensions and balance competing demands at the interface of the
corporate and venturing domains.
Executive summary
Missing from the robust debate over how corporate venture capital (CVC) units ought to be organized for success is a more
comprehensive appreciation of the ongoing tensions that CVC units face. By highlighting the inconsistent organizational goals and
conicting demands these dedicated investment arms face at the intersection of the corporate and venture worlds, we provide a
nuanced view of how CVC units can effectively be operated. Using a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) of 30 dedicated
CVC investment arms, we explore how successful units congure their internal arrangements in response to divergent demands and
tensions vis-`
a-vis the corporate parent and the ventures they are mandated to invest in. Extending the literature on CVC, we identify
four different solutions for effective CVC unit congurations and nd that explorative and exploitative innovation success demand
different set ups. Moreover, we nd that especially more mature and explorative CVC units engage in dynamic responses, distancing
* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: schueckes@bwl.uni-mannheim.de (M. Schückes), benedikt.unger@economics.unibz.it (B. Unger), tobias.gutmann@ebs.edu
(T. Gutmann), fels@campus.tu-berlin.de (G. Fels).
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Business Venturing
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jbusvent
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2024.106438
Received 15 March 2021; Received in revised form 12 August 2024; Accepted 1 September 2024
Journal of Business Venturing 40 (2025) 106438
Available online 19 September 2024
0883-9026/© 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license
( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ ).
themselves from their corporate sponsor (buffering) while at the same time increasing their efforts to maintain deliberate connections
to representatives of the very same corporate environment they stem from (bridging). These and other ndings will be discussed, and
our rich narratives explain how successful CVC units can be employed effectively to achieve various innovative outcomes.
1. Introduction
Corporate venture capital (CVC) has gained widespread recognition as a tool to stimulate external innovation (Basu et al., 2016a;
Souitaris et al., 2012). Unlike independent venture capital (IVC) rms, which primarily pursue nancial objectives, large corporations
create dedicated CVC units predominantly as a strategy for external innovation (Ernst et al., 2005). As a result of varying foci (Hill and
Birkinshaw, 2008) and contingent on a CVC program's life cycle (Ma, 2020), investments are used as a means to ll gaps in innovation
pipelines (Dushnitsky and Lenox, 2005;Paik and Woo, 2017), as a window to new technologies (Benson and Ziedonis, 2009;Maula
et al., 2013), as real options (Ceccagnoli et al., 2018;Van De Vrande and Vanhaverbeke, 2013), and for ecosystem building, partic-
ularly in competitive and rapidly changing industries (Basu et al., 2011;Sahaym et al., 2010). Despite a wealth of research exploring
the diverse motivations behind CVC, a critical consensus regarding corresponding performance implications remains elusive (Allen
and Hevert, 2007;Huang and Madhavan, 2020;Yang et al., 2014). A signicant source of divergence in CVC performance can be
attributed (in part) to the immense variation in organizational setups and heterogeneity of CVC units, an area that is receiving renewed
attention in the literature (Balz et al., 2023;Shankar et al., 2024;Souitaris et al., 2012). However, a clear distinction between “good”
and “bad”(i.e., successful vs. unsuccessful) organizational setups of CVC units is still lacking—an understanding that holds the po-
tential to illuminate the underlying causes of CVC performance disparities.
We propose that unraveling the CVC performance puzzle, along with understanding the associated structural setups, requires a
nuanced examination of the role CVCs play at the intersection of the corporate and IVC domain. CVC units are specialized investment
arms of established companies that acquire minority stakes in startups. They represent corporate subunits uniquely tasked with
blending these two domains together through their organizational arrangements and structure (Souitaris et al., 2012). This position
exposes CVC units to signicant tensions in managing contradictory goals and multiple stakeholder expectations. Indeed, in a recent
review of the CVC literature, Jeon and Maula (2022) identied several areas of tension arising from varying performance criteria of
numerous stakeholders, conicting demands inherent in straddling two distinct worlds, and the divergent perceptions of CVC uni-
ts—all of which pose considerable implications for CVC operations. Given the multifaceted nature of these tensions and the resource
dependency on the corporate parent, we contend that the conguration of structural arrangements at the interface with the corporate
sponsor plays a pivotal role in determining the ultimate success of CVC units (Basu et al., 2016a;Hill and Birkinshaw, 2014;Thornhill
and Amit, 2001). Previous research explains the inherent heterogeneity in CVC practices due to their isomorphic behavior of seeking
legitimacy from either the corporate parent or the venture capital industry (Souitaris and Zerbinati, 2014;Souitaris et al., 2012). Initial
ndings also shed light on the complex interplay of both structural and operational factors that can have signicant implications for
CVC unit performance (Basu et al., 2016b;Bendig et al., 2024;Drover et al., 2017) and determine whether CVC units' innovation
outcomes are closely aligned with the parent company's current core business or explore beyond it (Hill and Birkinshaw, 2014;Lee
et al., 2018). In light of these insights, our research question emerges: In response to diverging demands from multiple organizational
constituencies, how can CVC units be congured to effectively achieve innovation performance?
Empirically, we employ an inductive theory-building approach based on fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to
account for the multifaceted and complex nature surrounding the organizational setup of CVC units (Douglas et al., 2020;Fiss, 2011;
Ragin, 2008). We analyze a total of 30 CVC units and focus on their structure and practices by collecting documentary evidence and
conducting 76 interviews with senior-level executives. In particular, we investigate the relationship and organizational interfaces
between the CVC unit and its corporate parent by analyzing its vertical and horizontal autonomy, leadership involvement, and
collaboration. Using a congurational approach, we are able to compare the features and setups of successful and unsuccessful CVC
units.
We nd that young CVC units seeking exploitative innovation tend to align closely with their corporate sponsors and conform to
established norms to succeed. By contrast, more mature CVC units and those seeking explorative innovation are forced to respond to
more pronounced tensions as they pursue goals more aligned with the contrasting IVC domain. They are characterized by their ability
to skillfully manage relationships among different stakeholders and consequently regulate the distance to both the corporate and IVC
domains. Our study design allows us to additionally check for ambidextrous CVC units, i.e., units that simultaneously produce
explorative and exploitative innovation for their parent company. We nd that such CVC units need a more dynamic setup that allows
them to selectively initiate collaboration between portfolio companies and the corporate core business when it is deemed mutually
benecial, and to maintain distance between them when it is not. To aid us in explaining their behavior, we leverage the concepts of
buffering and bridging (Meznar and Nigh, 1995). Successful CVC units employ bridging to maintain connections to representatives of
the sponsor they stem from while using buffering mechanisms to distance themselves from their originating domain. They therefore
engage in seemingly contradictory push-pull behaviors to navigate the conict-prone setting of following the conformity demands
from multiple constituencies.
Our ndings contribute to the literature on CVC in multiple ways. We join a nascent stream of research that qualitatively in-
vestigates the inner workings of CVC units and sheds light on the heterogeneity of organizational arrangements and strategies across a
plethora of rms (Basu et al., 2016a;Shankar et al., 2024;Souitaris and Zerbinati, 2014). We offer a comprehensive and ne-grained
perspective on the role of CVC units given the complex and divergent demands of a wide range of stakeholders in order to address the
inconclusive results of the literature on CVC performance. While prior literature theorizes that CVC units confronted with multiple
institutional demands ultimately choose to align with one of the environments (Souitaris et al., 2012), we argue that in order to achieve
M. Schückes et al. Journal of Business Venturing 40 (2025) 106438
2
high performance regrading varying innovation outcomes, and because of the CVC unit's unique position, it aligns with both envi-
ronments to different degrees contingent on contextual factors with multiple local optima (e.g., Fisher et al., 2016;McKnight and
Zietsma, 2018;Zhao et al., 2017). Extending this line of analysis (Basu et al., 2016a;Souitaris and Zerbinati, 2014), we link the
structure and practices of CVC units to two different strategic outcomes—exploitative and explorative innovation (Hill and Birkinshaw,
2014)—and assess their performance through a novel approach that forms set memberships by considering case context and leverages
rich qualitative data (T´
oth et al., 2017). We are thereby able to account for the above-mentioned heterogeneity and study the per-
formance implications of diverging structural arrangements. We draw on Basu et al. (2016a), who suggest that the alignment between
structural arrangements and the resulting relationship to the corporate parent and external search can have considerable performance
implications. We portray CVC units as uniquely positioned between distinct constituencies that provide these organizations with room
for how to arrange their organizational structure accordingly. By introducing the concepts of buffering and bridging to the CVC
literature, we draw connections to organizational theory and the seminal work by Meznar and Nigh (1995), who show how public
affairs activities buffer (i.e., protect an organization from the external environment) and bridge (i.e., adapt to conform with external
expectations) in boundary-spanning activities. By integrating previous research from the elds of entrepreneurship and strategic
management, we offer a more nuanced explanation of CVC designs and performance for various innovation outcomes, enabling better
comparisons across CVC programs (Hill and Birkinshaw, 2014). In addition, we discuss managerial implications and offer insights into
practical applications and future research directions.
2. Tensions in corporate venture capital: theory and evidence
Corporate venture capital refers to direct minority equity investments made by established corporations in privately held entre-
preneurial ventures (Dushnitsky and Lenox, 2005) with predominantly strategic objectives (Ernst et al., 2005). These investments are
typically carried out and managed through dedicated organizational units (e.g., Basu et al., 2016a;Hill and Birkinshaw, 2008). By
seeking strategic returns for their corporate parent while accepting the risks associated with venture capital, these CVC units differ
fundamentally from traditional IVC partnerships seeking purely nancial returns (Chesbrough, 2000) and hence face additional
challenges and tensions.
2.1. CVC units as a means to drive corporate innovation
CVC investments are primarily associated with strategic returns that outweigh the importance of nancial returns (e.g., Ches-
brough, 2002;Huang and Madhavan, 2020). Large corporations and entrepreneurial ventures typically differ substantially in the way
they operate and make decisions (Siegel et al., 1988), and especially innovate (Freeman and Engel, 2007). CVC units are established
precisely to bridge this gap, reconciling the professional logics of the startups in which they invest with the demands of their corporate
parent (Siegel et al., 1988) and creating mutually benecial synergies where each side can insource what they lack and benet
strategically from the other side's strengths (Ernst et al., 2005). Indeed, a recent meta-analytic study by Huang and Madhavan (2020)
shows that CVC activities can lead to signicant improvements in corporate strategic performance, including product and techno-
logical innovation outcomes. It is notable that a less substantial relationship was found between CVC activities and long-term nancial
performance outcomes.
Nevertheless, due to its complex and abstract nature, a comprehensive understanding of the exact strategic benets of CVC ac-
tivities for its parent organization remains underdeveloped, with initial research vaguely investigating the motivation to “gain a
window onto valuable, novel technologies so as to improve rm innovative efforts”(Dushnitsky and Lenox, 2005, p. 616) or “enhance
(the) ability to innovate”and “open new markets”(Ernst et al., 2005, p. 238). Recently, however, a more nuanced perspective has
emerged. For instance, Danneels and Miller (2023) describe different direct (direct access to/direct acquisition of venture technology)
and indirect pathways (long-term sensing and shaping of future opportunities) through which CVC activities can contribute to the
strategic renewal of established corporations. Shankar et al. (2024) focus on the search function of CVC units and nd heterogeneous
processes through which established rms can employ CVC units to search for external knowledge and technology from the entre-
preneurial environment.
The impact of CVC activity on corporate innovation performance has been identied as either exploitative or explorative in nature
(e.g., Rossi et al., 2020a, 2020b;Schildt et al., 2005). Exploitative outcomes are close to the corporate core business, including
improvement of the parent rm's operational excellence (Weber et al., 2016), investments in startups from related markets and
technological domains (Hill et al., 2009;March, 1991), and an increased recognition in the rest of the corporation of the importance of
new business development (Hill et al., 2009). In contrast, explorative outcomes involve the creation of options and investments in new
technological and commercial opportunities that have the potential to disrupt the existing model (e.g., Hill and Birkinshaw, 2014;Ma,
2020;Van De Vrande and Vanhaverbeke, 2013) and in technologies and markets relatively unrelated to the current corporate domains
(Hill et al., 2009;March, 1991). In some cases, CVC units may even pursue these two distinct innovation foci simultaneously (Hill and
Birkinshaw, 2014). However, this is easier said than done, and the tension between exploration versus exploitation-focused activities is
among the most studied topics in the CVC literature (Jeon and Maula, 2022).
2.2. Tensions in CVC: between the corporate and the venturing domain
CVC units encounter inconsistent organizational goals and conicting institutional demands at the intersection of the corporate and
IVC domains, with both carrying distinct institutional logics, meanings, and ways of doing things (Ahlf¨
anger et al., 2020;Jeon and
M. Schückes et al. Journal of Business Venturing 40 (2025) 106438
3
Maula, 2022;Pahnke et al., 2015). Institutional logics are dened as “the socially constructed, historical patterns of material practices,
assumptions, values, beliefs, and rules by which individuals produce and reproduce their material subsistence, organize time and
space, and provide meaning to their social reality”(Thornton and Ocasio, 1999: p. 804). To function effectively, CVC units need to
reconcile both the corporate logic and the professional logic of the IVC domain (Siegel et al., 1988).
On the one hand, CVC units are embedded in the corporate hierarchy and rely on the resources of the corporation as its sole limited
partner (Dushnitsky and Lenox, 2005). Their existence is inextricably tied to the demands of the corporate parent, and hence the parent
dictates the basis of their inaugural norms and logic. Life under a corporate logic is dened by unique patterns and conventions; for
example, membership is largely dened by executive experience within the corporation and legitimacy is derived from commercial
and technical success or the market position of a rm. Corporations themselves are characterized by complex hierarchies, dispersed
authority, organizational stability, and a vigorous focus on prot maximization (Thornton et al., 2012). This corporate logic also
inuences the structural arrangements and practices of the CVC program, as the CVC unit's performance may depend on idiosyncratic
resources and capabilities from the corporate core business. For example, the CVC unit may be operationally driven by the re-
quirements of business units (BUs) (Basu et al., 2016a) and must adapt accordingly to the corporate parent's authority structure and
strengths, oftentimes resulting in operational constraints. Similarly, CVC units often derive their legitimacy from initiatives driven by
the top management team (TMT), and their mandate to source external innovation may depend on the support and attention given to
CVC investments by senior management (Maula et al., 2013).
On the other hand, the corporate logic that informs CVCs at their inception may conict with the professional logic normally
surrounding the ventures in which they invest. This IVC domain is characterized by entrepreneurial experience, investment track
records, and at hierarchies that emphasize speed of decision-making in novel and unpredictable markets that are difcult to forecast
(Fisher et al., 2017). Furthermore, many traditional IVC practices, such as their elevated risk propensity or long-term investment
horizons, clash with those of corporate norms (Dushnitsky and Shapira, 2010;Hill et al., 2009). The performance of CVC-backed
startups hinges on their ability to exploit corporate resources and capabilities (Alvarez-Garrido and Dushnitsky, 2016;Balachan-
dran, 2024;Park and Steensma, 2012), such as access to customers, technological know-how, reputation, and/or industry expertise
(Keil et al., 2010). However, as Pahnke et al. (2015) argue, the prevailing corporate culture and working methods can hinder startups
from accessing and deploying corporate resources idiosyncratically, regardless of the fact that this is the key argument for CVC
syndication in the rst place (Keil et al., 2010). Managing the organizational interface between the CVC unit and the corporate parent
thus becomes crucial for CVC managers—not only to access resources and capabilities that are vital to the CVC units' value proposition,
but also in managing expectations and extracting value for the corporate parent to ensure the unit's own long-term survival and success
(Kohut et al., 2021;Ma, 2020).
2.3. Responding to tensions: managing the interface between CVC and corporate parent
Originating in the CVC literature (Basu et al., 2016a;Hill and Birkinshaw, 2008, 2014;Souitaris et al., 2012) and drawing on a
recent systematic literature review identifying key tensions in CVC activities (Jeon and Maula, 2022), we select two relevant structural
interfaces between the CVC unit and the corporate parent through which CVC units can manage conicting expectations and demands:
(a) the interface between the CVC unit and the corporate's top management team (TMT), and (b) the interface between the CVC and the
corporate's business units (BU). In the following, we outline both dimensions and their relevance for CVC units' performance by drawing
connections to prior literature. We also discuss (c) the maturity of the CVC unit in our analysis as an important contextual factor that
determines how CVC units should be congured to function effectively. Moreover, regarding our research question, and given that
explorative and exploitatively oriented CVC units benet from different structural and operational setups (e.g., Hill and Birkinshaw,
2014;Lee et al., 2018), we will also illustrate the current (limited) understanding regarding how the strategic focus of a CVC unit
determines which congurations lead to increased innovation performance.
2.3.1. CVC-TMT interface
While from a leadership perspective CVC investments can provide timely information on emerging and potentially disruptive
technology innovation and business models (Christensen and Rosenbloom, 1995;Maula et al., 2013), previous literature describes the
involvement of top management as a double-edged sword for the functioning of a CVC unit. On the one hand, the inclusion of senior
executives and TMT members as part of the investment decision committee is seen as allowing CVC units to gain legitimacy within the
core business and align their process with the parent company (Strebulaev and Wang, 2021). On the other hand, CVC units with overly
complex, multi-stage decision-making processes may become too slow in comparison to IVC investors (Strebulaev and Wang, 2021).
High levels of decision-making autonomy may also serve as a form of intrinsic motivation for CVC managers, positively affecting unit
performance (Fischer et al., 2019).
When CVC units are allowed to become autonomous and distance themselves from the corporate parent's operations, top managers
still need to exercise control to avoid opportunistic behavior and strategic fragmentation (Sahaym et al., 2016). Lee et al. (2018) show
that the explorative innovation performance of CVC units benets from greater autonomy from the corporate core business and the
implied increased managerial decision-making power, while the opposite is the case for exploitative innovation. Insights from insti-
tutional theory, however, suggest that the role of leadership becomes particularly accentuated when organizations face complex and
conicting external pressures (Greenwood et al., 2011) that require “leaders who are able to understand, and are sensitive to, the
expectations and requirements of (different) constituencies”(p. 356). Following this line of reasoning, it becomes imperative for
corporate leaders to act with particular sensitivity in CVC contexts where the strategic focus of a CVC unit is not aligned with the
strategic needs and focus of the corporate BUs as representatives of the rm's core business. While the importance of ambidexterity in
M. Schückes et al. Journal of Business Venturing 40 (2025) 106438
4
leadership tasks has been widely recognized, i.e., the ability to reduce and increase variance in follower behavior (Rosing et al., 2011),
there is a lack of evidence on how exactly corporate leaders can give their CVC units the right amount of autonomy to allow them to
openly explore new forms of innovation without straying too far from a rm's core.
2.3.2. CVC-BU interface
What distinguishes CVC investments from traditional IVC is the promise to add value to the venture by providing access to
corporate resources and capabilities and leveraging a corporation's network primarily through interactions with its BUs (Di Lorenzo
and van de Vrande, 2019;Paik and Woo, 2017). A CVC unit's success thus hinges on its relationship with corporate actors to manage
shared interests and meanings between corporate interests and entrepreneurial concerns (e.g., Shankar et al., 2024;Souitaris et al.,
2012). Pahnke et al. (2015) have shown that funding sources with different institutional logics (i.e., corporate, state, and IVCs)
differently impact innovation outcomes of sponsored ventures. Thus, the right balance must be struck between CVC corporate inte-
gration and autonomy to ensure that the needs of the startup partners are not marginalized and the demands of the corporate BUs do
not become overwhelming, while at the same time ensuring that the resulting innovation does not focus solely on the needs of the IVC
domain and miss the needs of the corporate core.
The structural and decision-making autonomy of CVC units in managing BUs interference has received plenty of scholarly attention
ever since the inception of CVC research (e.g., Hill et al., 2009;Keil, 2004;Siegel et al., 1988). Autonomy is usually considered
necessary to provide an environment for effective CVC investments since it safeguards a CVC unit from corporate roadblocks and a
culture that does not align with entrepreneurial practices. Subsequent CVC research has recognized the importance of structural
characteristics and categorizes CVC units as either structurally differentiated or integrated, reected in their degree of horizontal
autonomy (Lee et al., 2018) and the dominance of a particular constituency. Prior literature associates more independence with the
IVC model (since IVCs generally enjoy a high degree of autonomy from investors) and less with the corporate model (because the
corporate parent dominates the decision-making within the CVC unit) (Hill et al., 2009). Accordingly, we regard mimicking the IVC
model with high independence and greater autonomy from the BUs as a way CVC units can try to avoid extensive exposure to internal
corporate norms and demands, while we see greater integration and low horizontal autonomy from the BUs as a way to shield the CVC
unit from demands of the IVC domain.
In addition to structural considerations, research suggests that tensions arising from the coexistence of multiple (and sometimes
divergent) environmental pressures and conicting internal demands can frequently be resolved by formal and informal collaboration
between different constituencies (Ramus et al., 2017). Empirical evidence shows the importance of the interplay of a CVC unit's re-
lationships with both corporate executives and BUs, especially in cases where CVC units produce both explorative and exploitative
innovation outcomes simultaneously (Hill and Birkinshaw, 2014). When organizational members work together and create ties, they
can effectively interact in so-called “spaces of negotiation”(Battilana et al., 2015) and engage in category-spanning collaborations to
settle tensions and make trade-offs arising from conict (Canales, 2014;Wry et al., 2014). With respect to collaborative approaches in
asymmetric partnerships between corporate rms and startup partners, recent research emphasizes the role of a dedicated CVC in-
ternal business development teams as an operational key link between startup rms and both TMT and BU managers (Prashantham and
Madhok, 2023) and as a translator between the corporate and startup worlds to enhance co-creation (Nobari and Dehkordi, 2023).
Thus, the role of a dedicated CVC management team is not only to facilitate knowledge ows among TMT, BU, and the CVC investment
arm, thereby improving internal decision-making, but also to support new venture growth and shape entrepreneurial ecosystems
(Gutmann et al., 2023). Given its integrative role, the role of a dedicated business development team for CVC performance may be even
more important in cases where a CVC unit has been structurally separated from the parental company's core business, and thus
potentially de-coupled from the corporate operational logic, but at the same time is engaged in business development activities that are
directly relevant to the ongoing operations of the company's core business.
2.3.3. CVC maturity
An important contextual factor that may inuence the optimal conguration of a CVC unit is the maturity or age of the unit, i.e., the
design and strategic orientation of a CVC unit is the result of a dynamic process rather than a static decision and may therefore change
over time. In general, the CVC industry is subject to considerable uctuations not only in terms of investment waves but also in terms of
the creation and closure of CVC investment arms (Gompers and Lerner, 2001). The shorter life cycles of CVC units compared to their
IVC counterparts (Gompers and Lerner, 1998) suggest that CVCs are under strong performance pressure and scrutiny from the
corporate core. Sometimes CVC entry decisions are driven primarily by the desire to address the parent's most pressing innovation
weaknesses, and sometimes investments are terminated when these were sufciently addressed without moving on to other strategic
endeavors (Ma, 2020). In other cases, CVC units may evolve or adapt over time to better address the needs of both the corporate parent
and the entrepreneurial partners, or to reorient and pursue alternative strategic goals (Weber and Weber, 2005). However, while it
would be reasonable to expect that the performance of CVC units would therefore increase over time and thus inuence their longevity,
the age of a CVC unit surprisingly does not seem to correlate with its strategic performance (only with its nancial performance) (Hill
and Birkinshaw, 2014). These insights from prior research on the topic suggest a complex interplay between CVC unit congurations
and designs, their maturity, and overall effectiveness.
M. Schückes et al. Journal of Business Venturing 40 (2025) 106438
5
3. Methodology
3.1. Neo-congurational approach and fuzzy-set QCA
Building upon a neo-congurational perspective (Misangyi et al., 2017), the focus of this study is to develop a richer understanding
of the structural arrangements of CVC units operating under tensions and pressure from distinct constituencies. A neo-congurational
approach resonates with the theoretical demands of our study and offers a rich methodology for dealing with combinations of
organizational arrangements that align or differ in a multitude of ways (Fiss, 2007;Grandori and Furnari, 2008;Meyer et al., 1993).
Empirically, we employ a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). Based on QCA methodology that was originally intended
to identify qualitative patterns (Miller, 2018), this technique allows for examining the effect of different organizational characteristics
and dimensions on a related outcome (Ragin, 2008). While an in-depth explanation of fsQCA is beyond the scope of this paper, it is
worth noting two features that are particularly relevant. First, fsQCA allows us to analyze how combinations of multiple variables
inuence an outcome (Fiss, 2007). This feature plays a crucial role when analyzing organizational arrangements with complex and
asymmetric causality where “variables found to be causally related in one conguration may be unrelated or even inversely related in
another”(Meyer et al., 1993, p. 1178). The congurational approach embedded in fsQCA thereby helps us to capture the link between
the coherence of organizational and environmental factors and organizational effectiveness—an omnipresent mystery in the CVC
literature. Second, fsQCA crucially does not assume uninality (a single optimal conguration) but allows for equinality (more than
one conguration path leading to a desired outcome) (Fiss, 2007;Miller, 2018). This capability is especially important as it accounts
for complex causality and conjunctive phenomena reecting our desire to understand interdependencies among CVC units' setups.
3.2. Sample and data source
In set-theoretical approaches, case selection proceeds by purposive sampling (Fiss, 2007;Ragin, 2000). Informed by prior CVC
literature, we constructed a sample of CVC units based on the following criteria for case inclusion: (1) each was a dedicated and
specialized program or unit seeking minority investments in innovative ventures; (2) the unit was established and fully backed by a
corporation, which served as the only “limited partner”; (3) each unit had invested in at least ten ventures since its launch to ensure
some extent of performance evaluation was possible and a genuine CVC operation was underway; and (4) the unit was active at the
time of this study to reduce recall or reporting bias. By purposefully diversifying the selection of cases to allow for variance in factors
such as industry, geographic region, and size, we captured a rich, heterogeneous sample of CVC units that allows us to examine
performance differences under different conditions.
Our sample includes 30 cases for which we collected both primary and secondary data. This mid-sized sample allowed us to have
close relationships with our cases and exploit their qualitative richness while simultaneously possessing enough variance to compare
cases (Greckhamer et al., 2013;Wagemann et al., 2016). The primary data are drawn from semi-structured in-depth interviews with
senior-level executives of CVC units. Interviews were conducted between 2018 and 2022 via telephone or in-person, which resulted in
76 interviews of 92 h in total duration with about 1800 pages of text transcribed verbatim. We further collected documentary evidence
from both internal (press releases, brochures and presentations, guidelines, internal memos, employee proles) as well as external
sources (press coverage, website information), resulting in about 1350 pages of archival data. The collection of data from several
sources facilitated data triangulation and increased the validity of the research results. A description of the cases and the interview
partners can be found in Table 1.
To increase our condence in the data, we took several procedural steps. First, when conducting interviews, we contacted multiple
informants to ensure both the reliability and validity of the information collected (Kumar et al., 1993). Second, similar to Souitaris
et al. (2012) and Hill and Birkinshaw (2014), we treated case company employees as additional informants and followed up with them
via email, obtaining further clarication and conrmation of our data points. Third, we involved non-incumbent raters (two former
senior corporate venture capitalists) who were knowledgeable about the cases and the CVC industry to validate the data obtained from
the primary respondents, thereby demonstrating that the data have face validity for independent practitioners (Podsakoff et al., 2012;
Spector, 2006). In our study, we achieved an intercoder reliability value of 0.82 (Krippendorff's alpha) (Hayes and Krippendorff,
2007). This indicates a high degree of agreement between coders in classifying and coding our data, as an intercoder reliability co-
efcient of 0.8 or more is generally considered reliable when it comes to drawing substantive conclusions from the data (Krippendorff,
2004). Fourth, we involved counterbalancing question orders and ensured respondent anonymity (Podsakoff et al., 2003). Finally, we
based the causal conditions on factual data (e.g., reporting line), which are relatively impervious to most biases (Spector, 2006).
3.3. Measurement and calibration
Calibration of the data is a necessary prerequisite for conducting an fsQCA (Ragin, 2008). The calibration transforms the qualitative
data into set memberships. We build our mixed-calibration approach (described below) on extant literature about CVC. In our analysis,
we consider two different outcome conditions to capture the innovative performance of the CVC units (explorative and exploitative
innovation) and ve causal conditions (two of which describe the organizational arrangements on the CVC-TMT interface, two
describe organizational arrangements on the CVC-BU interface, and one describes the contextual condition CVC unit maturity). Table 2
offers an overview of our variables and their calibration, while Table 3 offers the calibration table for each case (the detailed cali-
bration criteria for all causal conditions can be found in Appendixes A and B; see Appendix C for an illustrative example of the coding of
the outcomes).
M. Schückes et al. Journal of Business Venturing 40 (2025) 106438
6
Table 1
Description of 30 cases studied.
Case
name
Parent rm (2019) Setup of CVC
unit
a
Fund size/yearly
investment amount (EUR)
Year CVC unit
founded
Principal informants (# interviews)
Industry Revenue range
(EUR)
# of
employees (k)
Headquarters
(country)
Case 1 Conglomerate >100 bn 280 USA Department 100 m yearly 2013 Senior Investment Manager (2)
Case 2 Conglomerate 75–100 bn 380 Germany Separate entity 1 bn fund 1995 Senior Investment Manager 1 (1); Senior Investment
Manager 2 (1); Managing director 1 (1); Managing director 2
(1)
Case 3 Electronic <25 bn 13 USA Department Not disclosed 2002 Managing director (2); Head of Startup Ecosystem (1)
Case 4 Consumer goods <25 bn 53 Germany Department 150 m fund 2007 Head of corporate venturing (2); Innovation manager (1);
Director of Corporate Venturing (1)
Case 5 Machinery <25 bn 1 Germany Separate entity Not disclosed 2015 Chief venture ofcer (1); Investment manager (1)
Case 6 Media <25 bn 16 Germany Separate entity Not disclosed 2014 Managing director 1 (1); Managing director 2 (1)
Case 7 Automotive 25–50 bn 105 Sweden Separate entity No dedicated amount 1998 CFO (1); Investment director 1 (1); Investment director 2 (1)
Case 8 Transportation 25–50 bn 306 Germany Separate entity Not disclosed 2013 Investment director (1); Senior manager venture
development (1); Senior Investment Manager (1)
Case 9 Machinery 25–50 bn 147 Switzerland Department 50 m yearly 2009 Managing director (2); Senior Vice President (1)
Case 10 Tele-
communication
25–50 bn 120 Spain Department Not disclosed 2006 Managing director 1 (1); Managing director 2 (1); Managing
director 3 (1); Managing director 4 (1)
Case 11 Machinery <25 bn 15 Germany Separate entity 40 m fund 2016 Investment manager (1); Managing director (1)
Case 12 Chemicals <25 bn 4 Belgium Department 100 m fund 2005 Managing director 1 (1); Managing director 2 (1)
Case 13 Electronics 50–75 bn 107 USA Department Not disclosed 1991 Investment manager (3); Senior managing director (1)
Case 14 Automotive <25 bn 38 Germany Separate entity 15 m yearly 2015 Head of venturing and partner (1); Head of strategy (1)
Case 15 Automotive 75–100 bn 390 Germany Separate entity 200 m fund 2009 Investment partner (1); Open innovation manager (1); Vice
President (2)
Case 16 Oil &Gas >100 bn 73 USA Separate entity 500 m yearly 2012 Managing director 1 (1); Managing director 2 (1)
Case 17 Automotive 75–100 bn 70 South Korea Department 500 m yearly 2006 Investment manager (2): Investment analyst (1)
Case 18 Tele-
communication
25–50 bn 150 France Department Not disclosed 2015 Principal (1); Investment manager (1)
Case 19 Health care 25–50 bn 69 USA Separate entity 500 m fund 2009 Senior Investment Manager (1); Investment manager (1)
Case 20 Aviation 75–100 bn 153 USA Department Not disclosed 2017 Senior managing director (1)
Case 21 Electronics <25 bn 35 USA Separate entity Not disclosed 2000 Senior managing director (1); Investment director (1)
Case 22 Chemicals 25–50 bn 117 Germany Department Not disclosed 2015 Vice President (1); Managing director (1); Investment
manager (1)
Case 23 Electronics >100 bn 90 South Korea Department 150 m fund 1999 Investment manager (1)
Case 24 Automotive >100 bn 133 Germany Separate entity 0.8 bn fund 2002 Investment manager (1); Investment manager (1)
Case 25 Automotive 25–50 bn 240 Germany Department Not disclosed 2018 Investment manager (1); Investment manager (1)
Case 26 Chemicals 75–100 bn 110 Germany Separate entity 250 m fund 2002 Managing director (2); Investment manager (1)
Case 27 Banking <25 bn 40 Germany Separate entity Not disclosed 2005 CEO (1); Managing director (1); Investment manager (1);
Case 28 Manufacturing <25 bn 14 Germany Department Not disclosed 2018 Head of corporate venturing (1); Investment manager (1)
Case 29 Banking <25 bn 2 Germany Department Not disclosed 2016 Managing director (1); Senior Investment Manager (1);
Case 30 Insurance <25 bn 2 Germany Department Not disclosed 2017 Managing director (2); Investment manager (1)
a
CVC units are either strongly imbedded in the corporation as a department or organized as a separate legal entity.
M. Schückes et al. Journal of Business Venturing 40 (2025) 106438
7
Table 2
Coding procedure and set membership calibrations.
Category Condition Denition Coding scheme &set membership calibration Key sources
Explorative
innovation
performance
[outcome]
Creation of options on emerging
technologies for parent rm
Describes the extent to which CVC investments create options
for the parent rm that allow them to get acquainted with an
emerging technology
Fully in [“1”] if CVC provided evidence of creating
options on emerging technologies for parent rm
Hill et al., 2009;Van De Vrande
and Vanhaverbeke, 2013;
Ceccagnoli et al., 2018
Investments in disruptive
technologies
Describes the extent to which the parent rm gains exposure
to disruptive technologies that potentially cannibalize
existing technologies
Fully in [“1”] if CVC provided evidence of
investments in startups with disruptive potential to
the parent organization's core business/technology
Hill and Birkinshaw, 2014;Ma,
2020;Rossi et al., 2020a;Van De
Vrande et al., 2011
Investments in (technological/
market) domains relatively
unrelated to the current corporate
domains
Describes the degree of venturing in novel (technological/
market) domains
Fully in [“1”] if CVC provided evidence of CVC
activity in domains relatively unrelated to the
corporate parent's core business
Hill et al., 2009;March, 1991
Exploitative
innovation
performance
[outcome]
Improvement of parent rm's
operational excellence
Describes the extent to which the relationship with the
invested startups has helped improve the execution of the
parent rm's operations (e.g., improvement in product
quality or reduction in cost)
Fully in [“1”] if CVC provided evidence of portfolio
companies improving the execution of the corporate
parent's operations
Weber et al., 2016
Increased recognition in rest of
corporation of the importance of
new business
development
Describes the extent to which an entrepreneurial culture shall
be fostered through a CVC
Fully in [“1”] if CVC provided evidence of activities
and investments that fostered entrepreneurial culture
to establish new business within the parent rm
Hill et al., 2009
Investments in (technological/
market) domains related to the
current corporate domains
Describes the degree of venturing in known (technological/
market) domains
Fully in [“1”] if CVC provided evidence of CVC
activity in domains related to the corporate parent's
core business
Hill et al., 2009;March, 1991
CVC-TMT interface Vertical autonomy [condition] Describes the extent to which CVC unit managers have the
authority to make investment decisions independent from the
corporate TMT
Four-value-scheme between fully out [“0”] (TMT
approval required for all deals) to fully in [“1”] (CVC
unit is permitted to invest without TMT approval)
Hill et al., 2009;Lee et al., 2018
Leadership involvement [condition] Describes the access of the CVC unit to the corporate TMT Two-value-scheme between fully out [“0”] (no direct
reporting to the corporate TMT) to fully in [“1”]
(direct reporting to the corporate TMT)
Banker et al., 2011;Sahaym
et al., 2016
CVC-BU interface Horizontal autonomy [condition] Describes the extent to which other BUs of the parent
company are involved in the investment decision-making
process and have the ability to veto or inuence a deal
Four-value-scheme between fully out [“0”] (BU
approval required for all deals) to fully in [“1”] (CVC
unit is permitted to invest without BU approval)
Hill et al., 2009;Souitaris and
Zerbinati, 2014;Souitaris et al.,
2012
Collaboration [condition] Describes the collaboration between CVC unit and BUs Two-value-scheme between fully out [“0”] (absence
of a dedicated business development team) to fully in
[“1”] (presence of a dedicated portfolio development
team)
Biniari, 2012;Souitaris and
Zerbinati, 2014;Souitaris et al.,
2012
CVC context Maturity [condition] Describes the maturity and experience in terms of age of the
CVC unit
Four-value-scheme between fully out [“0”] (less than
one CVC life cycle) to fully in [“1”] (more than three
CVC life cycles)
Ma, 2020
M. Schückes et al. Journal of Business Venturing 40 (2025) 106438
8
3.3.1. Outcome conditions
Measuring the innovation performance
1
of CVC units is a challenging endeavor. This is illustrated in the vast heterogeneity of
performance measures in the academic literature and the ambiguity regarding the performance outcomes of CVC investments (e.g.,
Alvarez-Garrido and Dushnitsky, 2016;Hill and Birkinshaw, 2014;Huang and Madhavan, 2020;Thornhill and Amit, 2001).
A fundamental assumption of this study is a detailed and congurational understanding of the perceived innovation performance (i.
e., outcome) of a CVC unit, which cannot (or only partly) be captured by conventional measures (see Huang and Madhavan's (2020)
work on the multiplicity of performance outcomes). Moreover, fsQCA is considered an asymmetric research method that allows us to
understand the ne-grained and complex interplay of different antecedent conditions and how they impact specic outcomes (Douglas
et al., 2020). Therefore, effective use of the fsQCA methodology requires that the respective outcome variables can be coded into
unambiguous (fuzzy or crisp) set memberships (Pappas and Woodside, 2021), which is different to other methodological approaches.
Consequently, for our purposes, we nd it inadequate to measure CVC innovation performance based on an aggregated multi-item
Likert-scale (as in the previous CVC literature, which, unlike our study, often uses regression models (e.g., Garrett and Covin,
Table 3
Calibration table for fuzzy-set qualitative analysis.
Case ID CVC-TMT interface CVC-BU interface Context Outcomes
Vertical autonomy Direct reporting Horizontal autonomy Business dev. team Maturity (mature) Explore Exploit
Case 1 0.67 1 0.67 0 0.33 0.67 1
Case 2 0.67 1 1 1 1 1 0.33
Case 3 0 1 1 1 1 0.33 0.67
Case 4 0 1 0 1 0.67 0.33 0.33
Case 5 0.33 1 1 0 0 0.67 1
Case 6 0.67 1 0.67 0 0.33 1 1
Case 7 0.33 0 0.67 1 1 0 0.67
Case 8 0 1 1 1 0.33 0.67 0.33
Case 9 0 0 0 0 0.33 0.33 1
Case 10 0 0 0.33 0 0.67 0.33 0.67
Case 11 0 1 1 0 0 1 0.67
Case 12 1 1 0.33 1 0.67 0.67 0.67
Case 13 0.67 1 1 1 1 1 0.33
Case 14 0 1 0 0 0 0.33 0.33
Case 15 0 1 0.33 1 0.33 1 0.67
Case 16 0.33 1 0 0 0.33 0.33 1
Case 17 0.67 0 0.33 1 0.67 1 0.67
Case 18 0 0 0.33 0 0 1 0.67
Case 19 0 0 0.67 1 0.33 0 1
Case 20 0 0 0.67 1 0 0.33 0.67
Case 21 0 0 0.67 1 1 0.33 1
Case 22 0 1 0 0 0 0.67 0.33
Case 23 1 1 1 1 1 0.67 0.33
Case 24 1 1 1 1 1 1 0.33
Case 25 0.33 0 1 0 0 0.33 0.33
Case 26 1 1 1 1 1 1 0.67
Case 27 1 1 0.67 1 1 0.67 0.33
Case 28 0.33 1 0.33 1 0 0.33 0.33
Case 29 0 0 0.33 0 0.33 0.33 0.67
Case 30 0 1 0 1 0.33 0.33 1
1
To develop a performance outcome measure, we deliberately limited our analysis to strategic performance in general and innovation perfor-
mance of CVC units for their parent organization in particular. There are several reasons for this. First, while sometimes also purely nancial
outcomes may play a role (Chesbrough, 2002), prior literature shows that rms pursue CVC investments are predominantly initiated for strategic
reasons and with the objective to create synergies between corporations and portfolio rms (Chesbrough, 2000, 2002;Dushnitsky and Lenox, 2006).
Second, related research has shown that corporate venturing formats focused primarily on nancial objectives function signicantly differently,
with fewer collaborative touchpoints and especially less need for strategic alignment than their more strategic counterparts (Shankar and Shepherd,
2019). This suggests that our research design, which focuses primarily on the design of interfaces between the venturing domain and the core
business, may produce potentially misleading results when applied to nancial outcomes and objectives. Third, while there is also some ambiguity
about what it means to pursue CVC investments for strategic reasons (Covin and Miles, 2007), we found it particularly difcult to compare nancial
performance outcomes across CVC entities, as we found that some setups differ drastically. For example, while some of our respondents, similar to
conventional investors, have immediate insight into their CVC units' nancial returns, which they may even reinvest, others told us that they only
have a dened budget, with returns on investments booked directly through the CFO, who does not share detailed nancial insights. Finally, during
the data collection process, several of our respondents often signaled to us a greater willingness to discuss strategic implications than nancial
metrics, with some even directly stating that they could not discuss any nancial performance. To avoid dropout rates and biased results, we
therefore decided to focus primarily on the strategic perspective. However, as detailed in the respective subsection at the end of our paper, we
recognize that focusing solely on strategic performance in general, and the innovation performance of CVC units in particular, presents its own set of
limitations.
M. Schückes et al. Journal of Business Venturing 40 (2025) 106438
9
2015;Hill et al., 2009)). This is because such Likert-scales can consist of multiple items that refer to related but different concepts,
which may be closely related, but which do not refer to the exact same type of innovation outcome and is therefore not applicable to an
fsQCA research design requiring clear set memberships. Moreover, the assessment of innovation performance depends on the specic
objectives and expectations of a CVC unit, which leads to an even more complex assessment of whether a CVC unit is performing well
or not (Garrett and Covin, 2015;Weber et al., 2016).
Based on this reasoning, and in an attempt to balance the necessary specicity and breadth of innovation outcomes, we decided to
develop measures for two of the most cited dimensions of CVC innovation performance (e.g., Keil et al., 2016;Lee et al., 2018), namely
explorative and exploitative innovation. Specically, considering how March's (1991) concepts of exploration and exploitation have
been interpreted and applied in the CVC context in the past (e.g., Hill and Birkinshaw, 2014;Ma, 2020;Rossi et al., 2020a;Selnes and
Sallis, 2003;Van De Vrande et al., 2011;Weber et al., 2016), we examined the interview data using Generic Membership Evaluation
Templates (GMETs) (T´
oth et al., 2017) that helped to transform qualitative data into fuzzy sets. GMETs are tailored primarily for the
analysis of qualitative data in cases where quantitative anchors are not available. They transparently capture our interpretation of each
case, context-specic descriptions of the outcomes, the direction of the membership, and illustrative quotes supporting our assessment.
GMETs are therefore suitable to apprehend hard-to-quantify outcomes such as innovation performance. Such methods of transforming
qualitative data into set memberships have become more prominent in the literature (de Block and Vis, 2019;Waldkirch et al., 2021)
and prove a suitable way to differentiate between strategically performing cases and those that are not.
Accordingly, for each of the 30 cases, we created a GMET that included outcomes for both explorative and exploitative innovation
performance. Each outcome consists of three items (see Appendix C for an illustrative example). For each of the items, we wrote a short
assessment supported by interview quotes and knowledge from secondary data. Each item was discussed among the authors until
consensus was reached (Miles et al., 2014). To aggregate the items into the two outcome conditions, we took the overall number of
items that would fall into membership (rated as positive or negative), providing us a performance value between 0 and 3 for both
outcomes. As the literature cannot provide guidance on what anchor values associated with an overall innovation performance score
should be, the fsQCA literature recommends empirical calibration as a means to determine set memberships (Crilly, 2011). This is
appropriate since the goal of calibration is to identify meaningful groupings of cases that can be informed by substantial case
knowledge if the empirically derived threshold values represent logical and meaningful values external to the sample (Rihoux and
Ragin, 2012). The validity of the inference is hence assured by case knowledge. Accordingly, we devised a four-value scheme to
calibrate the direct value of the GMETs relative to high innovation performance (Ragin, 2009). A value of 3 per outcome was calibrated
as “fully in”relative to the high performer condition and assigned a membership score of 1, whereas values of 0 were calibrated as
“fully out”and assigned a membership score of 0. A value of 2 was calibrated as “more in than out”relative to the high performer
condition and assigned a membership score of 0.67, whereas the value 1 was calibrated as “more out than in”and assigned a mem-
bership score of 0.33.
3.3.2. Causal conditions
To determine optimal organizational arrangements of CVC units for achieving explorative and/or exploitative innovation out-
comes, we include four conditions in our analysis reecting the interfaces between CVC and corporate parent: (a) the CVC-TMT
interface is represented by vertical autonomy and leadership involvement through direct reporting activities, while (b) the CVC-BU
interface is represented by horizontal autonomy and collaboration through a dedicated business development team. While autonomy
(or its absence) at both interfaces is structural in character, we understand leadership involvement and collaboration as being of a more
operational nature. Moreover, to further understand the contextual conditions under which CVC units operate, we include an addi-
tional (c) contextual condition corresponding to the age and implicit maturity of the CVC units in our analysis.
Following Hill et al. (2009), we divided the measure of autonomy into vertical and horizontal components. To determine the degree
of vertical autonomy, we evaluate the extent to which CVC unit managers have the authority to make investment decisions independent
of the corporate TMT (Hill et al., 2009). To calibrate the data for this condition, we applied a four-value-scheme, which is “especially
useful in situations in which researchers have a substantial amount of information about cases”(Ragin, 2009, p. 90). The validity of
any eventual inference is hence assured by case knowledge. The qualitative data was coded between 0 (TMT approval required for all
deals) to 1 (CVC unit is permitted to invest without TMT approval). Quotes such as “the corporate C-level makes the investment
decision”indicate a low degree of vertical autonomy and were coded with 0, whereas quotes like “the authority to invest rests solely on
the CVC unit to make the call”provided evidence for a high degree of vertical autonomy and were coded with 1. Quotes such as
“Depending on the amount, we can either make the decision ourselves …within our investment team. When we want to invest beyond
a certain threshold amount, we would then approach our investment committee (…) two-thirds of the investments go without the
investment committee”indicate a relatively high degree of autonomy but with some limitations, and were coded with 0.67. Quotes
such as “We have to have a business sponsor and a champion in our investment committee. Those are the ones that make it over the
line”indicate a relatively low degree of vertical autonomy but with some freedom of action, and were assigned the value of 0.33.
2
The degree of horizontal autonomy was similarly operationalized following Hill et al. (2009) and assesses how extensively other BUs
of the parent company are involved in the investment decision-making process and have the ability to veto or inuence a deal. Like
with vertical autonomy, the degree of horizontal autonomy was coded on a four-value scheme between 0 (approval required from the
BU for all deals) to 1 (CVC unit is permitted to invest without BU approval). Quotes such as “when we invest, we need to get the buy-in
2
All the quotes on which the calibration of causal conditions is based can be found in Appendix B.
M. Schückes et al. Journal of Business Venturing 40 (2025) 106438
10
from the business unit”indicated a low degree of horizontal autonomy (coded with 0), while quotes such as “we don't need to get the
business unit approval”indicated high degrees of horizontal autonomy (coded with 1). Severe or slight limitations on horizontal
autonomy, as indicated by the quotes, “Having the stamp of approval from [the business units] saying, ‘We need this,’will streamline
that conversation quite a bit”and “The business units are consulted by that portfolio development team …but we don't ask for their
blessing”are accounted for by scores of 0.33 and 0.67, respectively.
The structural distance between the corporate TMT and the CVC unit inuences the intensity of interaction and communication and
thus the ability to exchange information (cf. Banker et al., 2011). Therefore, to assess whether the CVC unit has access to the corporate
TMT—a relationship that enables leadership to perceive and manage the demands of multiple stakeholders, act as a mediator between
the two, and provide legitimacy for the CVC unit's actions—we operationalized leadership involvement based on the reporting structure
of the CVC unit. The condition was coded on a two-value scheme between 0 (no direct reporting of the CVC unit to the corporate TMT)
and 1 (direct reporting to the TMT). For instance, “we are three levels below the corporate board”indicated indirect reporting and was
coded with 0, while “We report to the corporate CEO”indicated direct reporting and was coded with 1.
Drawing on our empirical data, we assessed collaborative operational linkages between CVC units and BUs by the presence of a
dedicated business development team because our interviews revealed an increased intensity of collaboration between the CVC unit and
the BU when such a team exists. This team is responsible for fostering partnerships between a portfolio venture and the BU and
therefore creates strong interactions between the BU and the CVC unit itself. As one principal informant states, “The portfolio
development team understands where and how to connect to people in the business units to get that leverage and strategic benet.”
The existence of a dedicated business development team was operationalized as a dichotomous variable and thus coded on a two-value
scheme where 0 stands for its absence and 1 for its presence. Statements such as “there's no split between an investment manager and a
development manager”were treated as evidence of the absence of a dedicated portfolio development team (coded with 0), while
remarks such as “we have a development team and their focus is only on helping the business units to cooperate with startups”
indicated the presence of a dedicated portfolio development team (coded with 1).
We operationalize CVC units' maturity by utilizing the age of the CVC unit. Since experience, reputation, and organizational
learning are decisive for our analysis, we utilize the foundation year of the rst CVC unit (which might have had a different strategy or
name compared to the current CVC unit). To determine the founding year of the rst CVC unit, we collected publicly available data. In
particular, we searched the website of the CVC unit and searched for newspaper articles, magazine articles, and press releases, and
validated the ndings with the principal respondents. The continuous measure of maturity was calibrated by integrating both the
observed median life cycle of CVC units (Ma, 2020) and the average life cycle of IVC funds (Gompers and Lerner, 2001) to account for
both the corporate origin of CVC units and the increasing assimilation to IVC-style fund structures. We decided to use a typical four-
value scheme that represents both the CVC and IVC life cycle by using 12 years (average IVC fund life) as a midpoint and 6 years
(average CVC life cycle) as a quarterly split. We coded units younger than 6 years as 0, those 6 years and older but younger than 12
years as 0.33, those 12 years and older but younger than 18 years as 0.67, and those 18 years or older as 1.
3.4. Analysis
As mentioned, fsQCA allows us to analyze whether relations between certain causal conditions and a particular outcome exist. In
fsQCA, the existence of such connections is assessed through a necessary and sufciency analysis of subset relations using Boolean logic
and algebra (Ragin, 2000, 2008).
3
Similar to other fsQCA studies (e.g., Crawford et al., 2024;Speldekamp et al., 2020), we performed a
split analysis to test for variations in our congurations across cases. Specically, we ran all of our analyses two times: once for each
outcome (i.e., exploitative and explorative innovation) to test whether congurational solutions differ across strategic objectives. The
fsQCA analysis was conducted using fs/QCA 4.0 software.
4
No simplifying assumptions were made.
3.4.1. Necessity analysis
Necessary conditions are identied by calculating the consistency value of the conditions with respect to each of the two outcome
variables (presence and absence). An individual condition is considered necessary when the consistency takes the value of 1.0 and
considered almost necessary for values between 0.90 and 0.99 (Greckhamer et al., 2018;Ragin, 2008;Schneider and Wagemann,
2012).
3.4.2. Sufciency analysis
To identify congurations of conditions that are sufcient to lead to explorative or exploitative innovation performance in CVC, a
truth table with 2
k
lines is created of all theoretical possible congurations where k represents the number of causal conditions. Thus,
in our analysis, the truth table consists of 32 rows (see Tables 4a and 4b for each outcome variable). Following Greckhamer et al.
(2018), the number of theoretical congurations is reduced by applying a minimum frequency threshold of two observations to ac-
count for the number of cases. Thus, theoretically feasible combinations not observed in the data sample are excluded, and parsimony
of the ndings is ensured by applying a relatively high-frequency threshold. Next, the consistency values of each combination were
analyzed to identify combinations that explicitly resulted in the presence of the outcome. Following prior studies (Ragin, 2000, 2008),
3
Please refer to Fiss (2011),Greckhamer et al. (2018) and Schneider and Wagemann (2010) for more detailed elaborations on fsQCA's analytical
properties.
4
The software can be accessed via http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~cragin/fsQCA/.
M. Schückes et al. Journal of Business Venturing 40 (2025) 106438
11
we applied a 0.8 consistency value as the cutoff value for the presence of the outcome. To avoid simultaneous subset relations of
congurations in both the presence and the absence of the outcome, we calculated the proportional reduction in inconsistency (PRI).
Only congurations with a PRI above the recommended minimum value of 0.70 were included in our solutions (Greckhamer et al.,
2018). We further distinguish between core and peripheral conditions (sometimes referred to as “contributing conditions”)
(Greckhamer et al., 2018).
4. Results
4.1. Necessary conditions for CVC innovation performance
None of the conditions has a consistency value above 0.9, indicating that neither the presence or absence of any single condition can
be considered as (almost) necessary for high or low explorative or exploitative innovation performance in CVC units (Greckhamer
et al., 2018;Ragin, 2008;Schneider and Wagemann, 2012) (see Appendix D for the full necessity analysis).
4.2. Sufcient conditions for CVC innovation performance
In Fig. 1 (intermediate solution), we display six individual congurations (C1—C6) associated with CVC performance in terms of
exploitative or explorative innovation (and one conguration (C7) that was associated with the absence of explorative innovation).
The overall solution consistency ranges between 0.89 and 0.94 and the overall solution coverage ranges between 0.22 and 0.55. This
indicates that these congurations bring about the outcome between 89 % and 94 % of the time and account for between 22 % and 55
% of the instances of these outcomes (Ragin, 2008). In addition, we present raw and unique coverage of each conguration. Raw
coverage refers to the proportion of cases that show the specic conguration as well as the specic outcome. Unique coverage in-
dicates how much of a given outcome is only covered by that specic conguration (Schneider and Wagemann, 2012). The identical
Table 4a
Truth table for outcome exploration (some rows are not displayed as they contain no cases).
Vertical
autonomy
Direct
reporting
Horizontal
autonomy
Business dev. team Maturity
(mature)
n Raw consist. PRI consist. SYM consist
1 1 1 1 1 6 0.938202 0.924138 1
0 0 0 0 0 3 0.709402 0.496296 0.496296
0 1 0 1 0 3 0.709402 0.496296 0.496296
0 1 0 0 0 3 0.597598 0.333333 0.496296
0 1 1 0 0 2 1 1 1
1 1 1 0 0 2 1 1 1
0 0 1 1 0 2 0.39521 0.246269 0.246269
0 0 1 1 1 2 0.33 0.197605 0.197605
0 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1
1 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 1
0 0 1 0 0 1 0.795181 0.492537 0.492537
0 0 0 0 1 1 0.744361 0 0
0 1 0 1 1 1 0.744361 0.492537 0.492537
0 1 1 1 1 1 0.711207 0.596386 0.744361
1 0 0 1 1 1 0.67 0.67 0.67
Table 4b
Truth table for outcome exploitation (some rows are not displayed as they contain no cases).
Vertical
autonomy
Direct
reporting
Horizontal
autonomy
Business dev. team Maturity
(mature)
n Raw consist. PRI consist. SYM consist
1 1 1 1 1 6 0.496255 0.112211 0.166667
0 0 0 0 0 3 1 1 1
0 1 0 0 0 3 0.597598 0.498127 0.661692
0 1 0 1 0 3 0.854701 0.748148 0.748148
0 1 1 0 0 2 0.858369 0.835 1
1 1 1 0 0 2 1 1 1
0 0 1 1 0 2 1 1 1
0 0 1 1 1 2 1 1 1
0 0 1 0 0 1 0.795181 0.000001 0.000001
0 1 1 1 0 1 0.744361 0 0
0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1
1 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1
0 1 0 1 1 1 0.744361 0.492537 0.492537
1 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 1
0 1 1 1 1 1 0.857759 0.507463 1
M. Schückes et al. Journal of Business Venturing 40 (2025) 106438
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Fig. 1. Sufcient congurations.
M. Schückes et al. Journal of Business Venturing 40 (2025) 106438
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raw and unique coverage values imply the uniqueness of these congurations (cf. Crilly, 2011).
To increase our understanding of the congurations, we identify the cases that belong to each conguration. We select cases with a
membership of at least 0.5 in the respective conguration. Membership in a conguration is equal to the minimum degree of a
membership in any condition which contributes to the conguration. The minimum membership score “indicates degree of mem-
bership of a case in a combination of sets. Its use follows ‘weakest link’reasoning”(Ragin, 2009). In principle, no case can have a
membership score >0.5 in more than one conguration (Ragin, 2008). However, because we are analyzing multiple outcome vari-
ables, some CVC units may be equally present in multiple congurations.
Drawing on a rich set of case data, the congurations that perform well in terms of exploitative or explorative innovation are
described in more detail below.
4.2.1. Congurations 1 and 2: young guided exploiters
The rst two congurations, C1 and C2, are characterized by a strong involvement of the corporate TMT (low vertical autonomy)
and the BUs (low horizontal autonomy), which ties the CVC unit closely to both the control of the corporate TMT and the particular
demands of the BUs. Cases 9,18, and 29 (for C1) and Cases 15 and 28 (for C2) reect these congurations, which were found to be
particularly effective for their parent company in terms of producing exploitative forms of innovation. In addition, given the tight
(structural) integration of these two congurations at both the interface with the TMT and the corporate BUs, and the relatively young
age of the CVC units representing them, we label these congurations as “Young guided exploiters.”
The purpose of these CVC units is to bring in startup innovation from the outside and insource their technological solutions to
ensure that their parent company maintains technological leadership. As explained by the Investment Manager of Case 15, “It is to help
[the corporate parent] to achieve technological leadership, with the help of innovation that comes out of startups….”The focus is on
technological solutions that can immediately help the current needs of the company and its existing customers. A Senior Investment
Manager from Case 29 offered this as the raison d'ˆ
etre of their CVC unit: “We were very close to the core business because we said that
this is the only area where we really have sufcient expertise.”Given their young age and the proximity to the current core busi-
ness—and thus a certain overlap and competition with other corporate innovation and entrepreneurial initiatives—Young guided
exploiters face a major challenge in securing the necessary resources and building the needed legitimacy within the corporation to
ensure current and future operations. As a result, these congurations prioritize the needs of their corporate parent and the need to
meet potential KPIs, even at the expense of the needs of their portfolio companies when necessary: “The purpose of [the CVC unit] is to
accelerate the innovation for [the corporate]. So, at the end of the day, it's about innovation and speed”(Senior Vice President, Case 9).
Thus, both C1 and C2 appear to benet from close structural integration with the top management team and the business units. At both
interfaces, there is a signicant corporate say in decision-making and whether or not investments are made. This gives the CVC units
legitimacy within their parent company in the early stages, as a Senior Vice President for Case 9 explained: “We have an investment
committee that is comprised of the Chief Technology Ofcer, the head of operations, and a relevant business unit manager. They
approve a deal. Above a certain dollar threshold, it goes up to the CEO and the CFO.”Congurations 1 and 2 differ in that C2 is an even
more extreme version of C1, in which the CVC unit is not only structurally integrated at both interfaces with the TMT and the BUs, but
C2 is also explicitly operationally integrated, i.e., C2 (unlike C1) is required to report regularly to the top management team and has a
business development team that increases due diligence while fostering the connection to the parent company's current business: “For
the last year and a bit, we have a [development] team…and their focus is indeed only helping [the corporate parent] to cooperate with
startups”(Open Innovation Manager, Case 15).
However, our data also reveal the limitations of tightly integrated Young guided exploiters, which despite their strengths in pro-
ducing exploitative innovation seem to have difculty with types of innovation that go beyond their parent corporation's current
business. The Managing Director of Case 29 noted, “We made sure to stay very close to our core business because we said that only
there do we truly have sufcient expertise and know-how.”Later in the interview he offered this observation: “We're constantly under
the microscope, with every move scrutinized by the top management and the BUs, but nobody is really in the lead. It's like trying to
dance with two left feet.”This illustrative quote offers a clue as to why C1 and C2 do not score highly in terms of more explorative
forms of innovation—it appears that these CVC units' pursuit of legitimacy within their host corporations comes at the expense of the
CVC units' legitimacy within the IVC domain.
4.2.2. Conguration 3 (and 7): BU collaborator
Conguration 3, observed in Cases 7,19,20, and 21, is characterized by purposeful interactions at both the CVC-TMT interface (low
vertical autonomy; no direct reporting) and the CVC-BU interface (high horizontal autonomy; a dedicated business development
team). Similar to C1 and C2, CVC units in C3 effectively source exploitative innovation for their corporate parents. However, due to
their more participatory (and less hierarchical) approach to interacting with the corporate BUs, we label them as “BU collaborator.”
This conguration can include both relatively mature (Cases 7 and 21) and younger CVC units (Cases 19 and 20).
While BU collaborators may focus primarily on technology and market areas close to the company's current core business, these CVC
units tend to take a slightly more medium- or long-term view, with a mindset focused on future-oriented product and service
development: “We're tasked with really doing and pursuing new forms of innovation that the business couldn't or wouldn't pursue on
their own but still t in the strategic scope of what we do as a company”(Managing Director, Case 20). In order to maintain a loose link
to the needs of their parent company–while avoiding the rigidity of daily BU activities and retaining the exibility to move more freely
in the IVC domain–BU collaborator units are only operationally linked to the BUs, gaining greater autonomy to engage in business
beyond immediate and short-term needs. With respect to responding to the needs of the BUs, the Investment Director for Case 7 noted,
“We spent a lot of time mapping their needs very carefully, and then tried to go out and nd those, but then you nd something totally
M. Schückes et al. Journal of Business Venturing 40 (2025) 106438
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different that is even more interesting.”While formal sponsorship or BU approval is no longer required, C3's investment focus is still
aligned with BU technology forecasts through operational and informal channels. “Nowadays, we talk to them all the time through this
spider web of interactions, connections, and relations,”Case 7's Investment Director shared. Those links “help us—when we nd
things—to calibrate if it's interesting.”He was quick to add that the loosening of ties to the BUs reects the realities of how more
mature CVC units work. At the same time, the BU staff maintains close structural integration with the TMT interface, ensuring buy-in
and resource allocation even though it is not tied to the immediate short-term needs of the corporate parent. In this way, the TMT acts
as a powerful signal to other corporate members to follow and collaborate with the CVC unit's new venturing initiatives.
In summary, we found that for the BU collaborator's approach to be successful, the portfolio companies need to be protected from
excessive corporate BU inuence to avoid slowing them down or moving them away from their mid- or long-term vision. In addition,
several interviewees acknowledged that this approach requires external expertise to help corporations take a more IVC-like perspective
on deals because “internal corporate lawyers just don't understand the venture space and don't understand risk.”(Managing Director,
Case 19). In consequence, the theme of protection from the corporate core ran through the comments of several interviewees; as the
Managing Director of Case 19 vividly put it, “There's no shortage of corporate personnel that would like to spend hours and hours and
hours of our portfolio companies' time just sucking their brains dry.”Probably as a form of self-protection, we recognized in the BU
staff units a distancing from the corporate domain—reected in the structural disintegration of the CVC unit from the BU inter-
face—and began to refer to this as structural buffering. At the same time, to avoid distancing themselves too far from the corporate core
business, BU collaborators not only maintain a strong connection to the TMT interface through structural integration, but also maintain
a loose but robust connection to the BU interface through a dedicated business development team. We consequently started to refer to
this behavior as bridging, i.e., primarily operational efforts to maintain connections with representatives of the domain they stem from.
The Managing Director of Case 20 offered the following depiction of the BU collaborator:“We have portfolio development teams and
dedicated focal points for each portfolio company. They are touchpoints that they can always go to on a daily basis to really help break
down and navigate the big corporate.”
Interestingly, the CVC units present in the BU collaborator are almost identical to Conguration 7, which refers to the absence of
more explorative forms of innovation. This nding suggests that C3 may be useful for a relatively long-term vision of innovation, but
only as long as it has at least some connection to the company's current core business: “It's more along the lines of ‘I'm going to invest in
companies that have interesting solutions that can allow our organizations to run their operations more efciently and effectively’”
(Investment Manager, Case 19). However, for investments in truly explorative innovations with an even higher degree of novelty,
disruptive potential, or business model innovation, the use of BU collaborator units seems contraindicated.
4.2.3. Congurations 4 and 5: young ambidextrous
This conguration, observed in Cases 1,5,6, and 11, is the only one that appears to be equally effective in pursuing both
exploitative (Conguration 4) and explorative innovation (Conguration 5). In addition, because the CVC units represented by the
respective cases are 4 to 7 years old since their inception and thus relatively young compared to other units in our sample, we label this
conguration as “Young ambidextrous.”The conguration is characterized by a loose coupling with the parent company's core, i.e., an
operational integration at the interface with the corporate TMT via a direct reporting structure, but at the same time a lack of inte-
gration at the BU interface (horizontal autonomy; absence of a dedicated business development team). In addition, the conguration
remains neutral on whether these CVC units should be vertically autonomous from the corporate TMT, signaling that this detail is of
little relevance for units of this type.
We better understand the different strategic roles that Young ambidextrous units can embody for their corporate parent by looking at
our rich qualitative data. For example, CVC units in this conguration take a primarily explorative stance, focusing on investments in
portfolio companies that have the potential to shape or even disrupt the future of the industry. The Senior Investment Manager from
Case 1 describes their unit's priorities this way: “What we're looking for is the startup companies that are going to revolutionize the
industry or are going to make a major difference to how the industry functions and operates.”He added, “We want to be there when
those industry changes happen with those companies that are making it happen.”At the same time, while it may seem contradictory
that CVC units with such a pronounced explorative stance can also be effective in exploitative innovation, we also nd evidence that
their exploitative function is enabled by the fact that these CVC units focus on highly future-oriented investments in startups with
disruptive innovation and technology—but mostly with a low level of market diversication and a focus on existing markets and
businesses of the parent company. In this way, the CVC units become a kind of “disruption radar”for existing corporate domains,
sometimes also with direct relevance to the current core business. As the Investment Manager for Case 11 put it, “We see ourselves as
part of the innovation strategy …we aim to facilitate new business development. And at the same time, always keeping track of the
business potential that is behind and that might be linked to [the corporate].”
In addition, respondents revealed that exploitative innovation outcomes from these Young ambidextrous units can also occur when
portfolio companies happen to coincidentally meet the immediate needs of the corporate parent and thus can be immediately
implemented in corporate operations (or at least help to understand the developments in the current business elds of the corporate).
The Managing Director in Case 6 sums up such fortuitous secondary spillover effects and their impact on exploitative innovation to the
corporate core:
The core element behind all we do on the venture level is to generate a nancial return. In addition to that, we want to use these in-
vestments to learn more about certain industries, certain trends in the market…When we invest in this new company, of course, we also
look into how we can actually also use this technology and implement it in [the parent company]. For example, we invest into [portfolio
company] which helped to improve the quality of [parent product] by 8 %.
M. Schückes et al. Journal of Business Venturing 40 (2025) 106438
15
To serve these multiple roles for its corporate sponsor, the main challenge for CVC units in this conguration is to maintain the
necessary distance from the corporate core to effectively venture into more explorative areas, while at the same time retaining the
ability to selectively engage with the corporate core and jointly exploit innovative outcomes within the corporate parent whenever it is
benecial and opportune for both the portfolio company and the corporate core to do so. The Managing Director from Case 11 aptly
describes the degree of uncertainty inherent in such an investment approach: “It's a very case-by-case thing. At the point in time when
we do an investment, very often it's not clear if a partnership actually gets established or if we can develop a new product with that
startup. What we do check is if there is a certain interest for partnership that might potentially be established.”
In summary, the results of our sufciency analysis and our qualitative data show that ambidextrous outcomes by CVC units are best
achieved by buffering the CVC unit from any BU inuence in the rst place, thus creating a high degree of horizontal autonomy. This
was seen as necessary because investing in startups with solutions that are not sufciently aligned with the company's existing products
and business model deviates from the company's short-term, prot-maximizing business logic. As a result, such investment decisions
are difcult to understand and evaluate from a business unit perspective. As the Chief Venture Ofcer in Case 5 noted, “We couldn't do
[CVC investments] inside the corporation because then we would be limited in our investment focus and we would be forced to using
only what the organization can offer to us…It's my responsibility to keep these [startup] guys focused on achieving their goals and not
to make these [corporate BU] guys happy.”Nevertheless, to allow for the simultaneous production of more exploitative innovation
outcomes, the CVC unit does not “burn all bridges”to the parent company, but instead has deliberate operational interactions among
the CVC unit, its portfolio companies, and the core corporate business that are selectively facilitated primarily by the corporate TMT.
Young ambidextrous CVC units typically maintain a direct reporting line to the TMT to keep them updated about their strategic (and
nancial) performance in their eyes. For instance, as Senior Investment Manager in Case 1 notes, “We measure [our impact] every six
months,”adding that this operational bridge was deemed necessary to maintain the trust needed from the TMT to continue their op-
erations with a relatively high degree of autonomy. In addition, the direct line to the TMT also functions as an initiator of occasional
collaborations between the CVC unit and the BU when they see an opportunity to leverage startup innovation in the operations of the
corporate entities (e.g., by integrating startup technology into product innovations). The Chief Venture Ofcer in Case 5 describes how
this works:
[The parent] has an extensive R&D unit that develops new products. We regularly arrange meetings with them and demonstrate our
portfolio to evaluate if they can collaborate with our ventures to build new products.
Our analysis shows that ambidexterity in CVC units—the parallel generation of explorative and exploitative innovation outcomes
for the corporate parent—can be achieved if a TMT strongly believes in the initiative, supports it, and understands the inherent
limitations. As the Managing Director in Case 6 shows, it would be unreasonable to expect IVC-level returns from a CVC unit that must
always keep at least one eye on its corporate core:
…over the past years we had a couple of outliers with a very good return …. We were very happy with it, but it's not that we achieved the
exit multiples, like the champions league of venture capitalists would achieve. However, we built certain new products in collaboration
with our ventures that have a huge impact on [our parent].
4.2.4. Conguration 6: autonomous corporate explorer
Conguration 6, which is embodied in Cases 2,13,23,24,26, and 27, is characterized by a high vertical and horizontal autonomy
with a direct reporting line to the corporate TMT and a dedicated business development team. In contrast to other congurations,
Conguration 6 is optimized to focus on mainly explorative forms of innovation and experiences high levels of independence from both
the CVC-TMT interface and the CVC-BU interface. Moreover, this conguration is the only one that refers primarily to more mature
CVC units, and most of our respondents indicate that this development toward more autonomy wasn't a linear one and was driven by a
desire to participate in better deals from a nancial as well as strategic perspective. Thus, we denominate this conguration as
“Autonomous corporate explorers.”
Autonomous corporate explorers focus their investments mainly on startups with both major technological and market potential.
Similar to traditional IVC, they aim to identify and support the most promising ventures, either to participate nancially in their
success or to grow and diversify the company. The company's current core business is not much of a concern in this approach, as an
Investment Manager in Case 23 makes clear: “We're looking to explore new markets and products that aren't even on the radar of
anyone in [the corporate], but where we think, based on megatrends that we see, that we'd like to stay close to, where seven to 10 years
down the line could be big business opportunities.”While CVC units of this conguration follow a similar logic to traditional IVC, they
are said to be differentiated by the unique expertise, assets, and access to their internal and external corporate networks that they can
offer to their portfolio companies:
[The CVC unit] is a path-nding arm for [the corporate parent] where we will deliver nancially attractive venture-style returns to [the
corporate] while executing upon strategically relevant deals where we can add unique differentiated value to the portfolio companies.
(Senior Managing Director, Case 13)
However, while this logic sounds very intuitive, most CVC respondents report that it is unfortunately often easier said than done. In
addition to the lack of venture-like speed of decision-making in the corporate domain, the demands on the BU were often said to vary
too much to develop the sound investment theses required to identify disruptive opportunities and participate in deals that were being
guarded by top-tier IVCs. As the Investment Manager for Case 13 observed, “In some corporate structures it hasn't been possible for a
M. Schückes et al. Journal of Business Venturing 40 (2025) 106438
16
CVC group to operate in a way that they need to—at the speed of entrepreneurship, and with the freedom to move that they need.”To
respond to the requirements of the IVC domain, links to the BU were largely discarded by CVC units in Conguration 6, again reecting
a strong tendency to buffer from the corporate audience in favor of the IVC domain. Whereas in most other congurations the CVC
remains strategically aligned to various aspects of the corporate domain, in Conguration 6 the CVCs are set up so that their portfolio
startups are “entirely walled off from the corporation”(Investment Manager, Case 13).
Respondents in this conguration pointed to the need to adapt in order to be taken seriously by startups and other members of the
IVC domain. This adaptation process was said to affect the entire organizational setup, ranging from decision-making authority and
compensation schemes to performance targets and human and nancial commitment. This CVC conguration therefore typically
embraces IVC practices, including having nancial targets (“our goal is to be in the top quartile”(Investment Manager, Case 23)) and
incentives (“We have full setup such as any other institutional VC, carry for the team”(Director, Case 24)) and thereby lets strategic
and nancial goals co-exist. The Investment Manager of Case 13 described “getting exits”as “the Holy Grail in the venture business”:
The challenge is one of navigation, because I roll my eyes when [some CVC] say … “Oh, I don't really care about returns. Returns don't
matter at all.”(…) I was like, “Well, you just shot yourself in the head, buddy, because what entrepreneur isn't going to want to make
money?”
Because of the competition with IVCs to attract the most promising startups with the highest technological and market potential,
some of our interviewees point to the need to create distinct value propositions that help differentiate the CVC unit. This value
proposition is paradoxically tied to the idiosyncratic resources, capabilities, and networks of the corporations from which these units
have distanced themselves, thereby increasing the need for a bridge back to the corporate parent. The Senior Principal of Case 13 was
quick to observe that “the only way we could ever compete with the likes of Sequoia [Capital] is by virtue of us having differentiated
value beyond our dollars, and that's predicated upon needing to leverage the corporation. I don't see why any entrepreneur would
otherwise work with us.”In order to deliver on this unique value proposition, CVC units in Conguration 6 fall back on strong links to
the corporate TMT (direct reporting as core condition) and to the BUs (through a dedicated business development team). But distinct
from other congurations that leveraged a business development team, the teams in this conguration instead depend on the whole
corporate ecosystem to support startup innovation. The Investment Principal for Case 2 saw this as embracing a “startup rst”
mentality that eschewed closer BU collaboration in favor of connecting the startups directly to the customers of the corporation.
In sum, Conguration 6 resembles most clearly the IVC counterpart through complete structural autonomy (i.e. buffering) and a
strong link toward the IVC domain. However, and in contrast to IVC, the idiosyncratic resources and capabilities of the corporate are
leveraged beyond company boundaries and are not only used to get into deals but shape the IVC industry as a whole. CVC units in
Conguration 6 rely on broad TMT support and dedicated personnel to not only manage relationships with the BUs but actively nd
suitable opportunities for their portfolio companies to prot from collaborations (i.e. bridging). The Investment Manager for Case 13
channeled JFK in summing Conguration 6: “Ask not what your portfolio company can do for you, but what you can do for your
portfolio company.”
4.3. Robustness checks
We engage in additional analysis to check the robustness of our results. Findings can be considered robust when relatively small
changes in the chosen decisions result in similar enough ndings regarding necessity and sufciency and lead to similar enough in-
terpretations of the paths identied (Schneider and Wagemann, 2012).
To check robustness, we rst test whether different consistency thresholds result in substantially different outcomes. Following best
practices proposed by Greckhamer et al. (2018), we conduct a PRI analysis, using the minimum PRI score threshold of 0.5 (as all values
below indicate signicant inconsistency). In addition, we also apply a higher threshold of 0.75 (cp. Frambach et al., 2016;Misangyi
and Acharya, 2014). Secondly, consistent with Crilly (2011), we choose a higher consistency threshold of 0.85 that represents a gap in
the raw consistency presented in the truth table. Third, we run the analysis with maturity calibrated based on the number of investment
cycles a CVC has been through. Since venture capital rms on average raise capital every ve years (Gompers et al., 2008), we calibrate
maturity based on the number of investment rounds a CVC has raised. Finally, we run a split analysis for both a subset of our more
immature and mature CVC units to see whether congurations emerge that did not meet the consistency threshold for both.
Most of our robustness results differ little or not at all from the initial results and lead to the same overall conclusions, indicating
overall robust results (Meuer et al., 2015). Only implications derived from C2 should be treated with some caution, as this congu-
ration was not present in most of our solutions derived from the robustness check. However, we don't consider this problematic as C2 is
considered a variation of the robust C1 (see Appendix E for a summary of all robustness checks).
In addition, because our two outcome conditions are not mutually exclusive, and because some CVC units were found to be
ambidextrous (Rossi et al., 2019, 2020b), we develop an additional binary outcome measure of ambidexterity to check the robustness
of these results. We consider a CVC unit to be ambidextrous if both exploration and exploitation outcomes scored 0.67 or higher
individually. We code such ambidextrous cases as 1 (“fully in”) and cases that did not successfully pursue exploration and exploitation
simultaneously as 0 (“fully out”). This robustness check conrms our choice to label congurations C4 and C5 as “ambidextrous.”
5. Discussion
We examine how CVC units organize themselves to produce either exploitative or explorative forms of innovation for their
corporate parent, thereby regarding structural arrangements as responses to incompatible and conicting demands from the corporate
M. Schückes et al. Journal of Business Venturing 40 (2025) 106438
17
parent and IVC domain. In particular, we analyze the intertwining of (a) the interface between CVC unit and TMT and (b) the interface
between CVC unit and BU under (c) contextual factors as response mechanisms to produce either exploitative or explorative innovation
performance. Our ndings are summarized in Fig. 2 and will be discussed below.
We nd that the performance of CVC units is closely tied to their interactions with the corporate parent, a relationship that is
modulated by the unit's maturity and its strategic focus. Specically, CVC units producing mainly exploitative innovation tend to be
closely tied to the corporate parent, relying on tight structural integration at the CVC unit's interface with the corporate TMT and its
established norms to attain operational legitimacy. Less mature exploitative CVC units also rely on tight integration at its interface with
the corporate BUs, while others gravitate toward greater decision-making autonomy from the business units and embrace a more
collaborative approach. In summary, units pursuing exploitative innovation maintain proximity to their corporate parent, while those
pursuing explorative innovation adopt a more maverick stance, actively managing the inherent tensions while departing from
traditional corporate directives. Ambidextrous units—capable of producing both types of innovation—do so by distancing themselves
from the corporate business in order to maintain their ability to produce explorative innovation, while relying on TMT help to
selectively reconnect with the corporate BU whenever it is opportune and startup innovation can be exploited within the corporate
core operations and products. Our ndings underscore the remarkable heterogeneity of effective CVC congurations for varying
innovation outcomes. Furthermore, they shed light on the underlying mechanisms that determine local optima, which are intricately
inuenced by both the objective and the maturity of a given CVC unit and can be interpreted by borrowing explanations from existing
theories and literature.
Borrowing from organizational theory (Meznar and Nigh, 1995) as well as research on corporate incubation (Amezcua et al., 2013),
we propose several explanations for our ndings. First, more mature and explorative CVC units seem to be more distanced from the
inuence of the corporate parent through an increased independence—especially at their interface with corporate BUs—thereby
engaging in a deance strategy toward corporate demands. This behavior serves as a buffering mechanism, and we propose that the
necessity of doing so can be explained by an interplay of various factors. It is a well-established principle that organizational subunits
pursuing explorative innovation goals can separate themselves from the corporate core to operate in dual modes, embodying the
concept of “structural ambidexterity”(O'Reilly and Tushman, 2004). This separation allows these independent units to innovate
without the constraints of existing corporate logics, fostering an environment for more explorative innovation. Similarly, it was found
previously that CVC units' exploration capability is positively impacted by its relationships with the venture capital community (Hill
and Birkinshaw, 2014). More explorative CVC units prove their worth by setting aside the immediate business needs of their corporate
parents to discover new aims, which forces them to deviate from their established corporate logics and adapt more to the novel IVC
domain. Thus, borrowing from theory on structural hybrid organizations (Perkmann et al., 2019), we theorize that their ability to
pursue more explorative innovation results from explicit deviance from the more exploitative goals imposed by the business unit. This
involves creating distinct organizational spaces separate from the corporate day-to-day operations to engage with an alternative
professional logic. Such hybrid spaces enable CVC units to better position themselves to compete with IVC partnerships for deal
participation (Perkmann et al., 2019). Moreover, Ma (2020) has argued that performance criteria deviate across life cycles as ex-
pectations on the role of the CVC unit change, which explains why we found that more mature CVC units primarily pursue explorative
innovation goals. In contrast to the structurally disintegrated explorative CVC units, less mature and primarily exploitative CVC units
are more strictly related to the business units' needs from which they draw legitimacy. This explains why they are more tightly in-
tegrated with the CVC-TMT and CVC-BU interfaces in order to avoid legitimacy issues and internal resistance by corporate stake-
holders that may see CVC investments otherwise as a waste of resources (Keil et al., 2008) or even a threat to the corporate core (Basu
and Wadhwa, 2013).
Second, similar to the requirement to use a buffering mechanism depending on the maturity and the strategic focus, we nd that the
requirement for operational bridging mechanisms is not stable but context-dependent. We theorize that both leadership involvement
and collaboration at the intersection with the TMT and BU serve as bridging mechanisms and become more important when simul-
taneously buffering from the corporate parent. In other words, high-performing CVC units that dominantly pursue agendas that deviate
from their corporate parent's norms (by possessing horizontal and vertical autonomy) need to bridge to constituents from their
corporate parent the more they buffer. We argue that bridging mechanisms are strategic responses to reconcile conicting institutional
processes and that they are necessary to maintain a connection between the CVC unit and the focal rm while at the same time
loosening other institutional attachments (Oliver, 1991). Specically, in line with the literature on managing institutional complexity,
i.e., the challenges posed by incompatible prescriptions from multiple institutional logics (Greenwood et al., 2011), we show that the
involvement of corporate leaders is crucial for effective CVC. Executives need to be able to understand how the needs of their CVC units
differ from those of their other business activities, and their involvement helps legitimize the goals of the CVC unit and sets clear
expectations among representatives—especially in cases where CVC units generate more exploratory innovations that deviate from the
rm's current business reality. Similarly, collaboration with BUs, whether initiated by the CVC units themselves or indirectly through
the TMT, allows for an intensive interaction between the venture and corporate representatives. This allows these actors from con-
icting logics to temporarily combine logics in order to exploit eventual complementarities, without however necessarily aiming
always for a midpoint between logics (Smets et al., 2015).
We conclude that these two mechanisms—buffering and bridging—are most important in mature and explorative innovation-
seeking organizations that deviate from corporate norms. Young and exploitative innovation-seeking CVC units deviate fully from
these mechanisms and tend to be tightly integrated into their parent organization to rst build their legitimacy among stakeholders
and build reputation. Other CVC units only deviate partially from these ndings, contingent on their unique contexts. For instance,
when exploitative CVC units turn their focus from the immediate demands of the corporate core toward more mid- and long-term
oriented issues, they search for more collaborative forms of connecting with the corporate BUs while remaining tightly integrated
M. Schückes et al. Journal of Business Venturing 40 (2025) 106438
18
Fig. 2. Congurational solutions and their explanation.
M. Schückes et al. Journal of Business Venturing 40 (2025) 106438
19
at the CVC-TMT interface. This can be explained by borrowing from the literature on (structural) hybrids, where it is a frequently
described phenomenon that collaboration between members of alternative institutional logics can lead to conict or even paralysis in
decision-making due to substantial differences in goals and objectives (e.g., Greenwood et al., 2011;Pache and Santos, 2010;Perk-
mann et al., 2019). As a result, collaboration strategies might be more feasible when the CVC unit is recognized as an established player
and possesses a certain degree of autonomy by the BUs, and at the same time enjoys support through the TMT signaling additional
legitimacy. Moreover, in designing ambidextrous CVC units that allow for the production of both exploitative and explorative forms of
innovation for their corporate parent, a more dynamic setup should be chosen, i.e., systems that buffer the units from the corporate
core most of the time, but allow CVCs to connect to the core BUs when opportune for both sides, thus selectively allowing the
exploitation of innovative outcomes within the corporate core through channels initiated by the corporate TMT. Thus, our article also
shows real-world examples of CVC units that only temporally separate themselves from their corporate parents (Hill and Birkinshaw,
2014) in order to switch back and forth over time between more explorative and exploitative forms of innovative outcomes (Puranam
et al., 2006;Siggelkow and Levinthal, 2003).
5.1. Contributions to entrepreneurial nance and strategical management literature
We contribute to ongoing discussions in the CVC literature on entrepreneurial nance (Drover et al., 2017). First, we link structural
arrangements of CVC units to their strategic performance, as commonly called for across the CVC literature (Basu et al., 2016a;
Souitaris and Zerbinati, 2014;Souitaris et al., 2012). More precisely, we assess CVC units' innovation performance through a novel
approach that leverages rich qualitative data by considering case context and forming set memberships (Douglas et al., 2020;T´
oth
et al., 2017). We are thereby able to account for the heterogeneity inherent in CVC setups and study performance implications of
diverging structural arrangements. We draw on Basu et al. (2016a), who suggest that the alignment between structural arrangements
and the resulting relationship to the corporate parent and external search can have a considerable impact on performance.
Second, we contribute by highlighting how CVC units need to adapt their organizational arrangements in relation to their strategic
focus. While prior literature theorizes that CVC units, faced with competing institutional demands from both their corporate context
and the IVC domain, will align their structural design in the long run with one of the environments, depending on with whom they seek
legitimacy (Souitaris et al., 2012), we regard the CVC unit's structural arrangements and responses to permanent tensions as a matter of
degree contingent on contextual factors with multiple local optima (e.g., Fisher et al., 2016;McKnight and Zietsma, 2018;Zhao et al.,
2017). Specically, by distinguishing between explorative and exploitative forms of innovative outcomes, we provide a new lens for a
more nuanced explanation of CVC designs and performance, allowing for better comparisons across CVC programs (Drover et al.,
2017). Prior CVC literature principally distinguishes CVC units according to their level of autonomy from the corporate parent or their
overarching objective (Keil et al., 2016;Lee et al., 2018). In contrast, we offer preliminary insights into the heterogeneity present
within CVC and extend current knowledge regarding the architecture of CVC units. As our congurations show, there is no one-size-
ts-all for either exploitative or explorative innovation-seeking CVC units, providing (further) evidence to our underlying notion that
the organizational reality of a CVC unit is more complex than earlier research portrayed.
Third, drawing on Meznar and Nigh (1995), we introduce the concept of bridging and buffering to the CVC literature. Most successful
CVC units (with the exception of C1 &C2) tend to employ different mechanisms of distancing themselves from their corporate parent
(buffering) while still maintaining links to the corporate interfaces in the form of collaboration and leadership involvement (bridging).
Given that there is an emerging discourse on how the distinct corporate logic and the professional logic within the IVC domain can be
reconciled within CVC units (e.g., Ahlf¨
anger et al., 2020;Pahnke et al., 2015;Shankar et al., 2024;Souitaris et al., 2012), our ndings
could also be interpreted as similar to Perkmann et al. (2019). Thus, we give a new direction to the research on CVC units by showing
how they act as structural hybrids, integrating logics locally within a bounded space to leverage corporate logics for the benet of the
external startups without hybridizing the existing logic inside the corporate host organization (Perkmann et al., 2019), as we illustrate
the bridging and buffering mechanisms inherent in the organizational design of the hybrid. Moreover, we extend and deepen this
discourse, both in general on structural hybrids and specically with respect to CVC units, by showing that they can be congured in
multiple equinal setups to effectively act between corporate logics and the logics normally surrounding the ventures in which they
invest, contingent on the specic context and the exact strategic intentions of the focal organization.
Finally, given the location of CVC units at the boundary with the strategic management domain and our choice of outcome var-
iables from the realm of ambidexterity theory, we also show how they can be congured to optimally contribute to different strategic
outcomes. Thus, our ndings may also contribute to the ongoing discussion of how rms can organize themselves dynamically and use
CVC investments to build an “external corporate venturing capability,”i.e., an “ability to develop new capabilities and to recongure
existing capabilities in the process of building new business areas outside of the current business focus of the corporation”(Keil, 2004;
p. 809).
5.2. Limitations and future research
We shed light on the tensions CVC units face and highlight the need that in order to achieve innovation performance, CVC managers
must balance demands and expectations from two distinct worlds simultaneously as a function of a CVC unit's strategic focus and
maturity. We use these ndings to better inform the literature on CVC and its quest for the performance implications of these programs
(Huang and Madhavan, 2020;Ma, 2020).
For the purpose of this study, we made several assumptions. First, we assumed that CVC unitsare intended to prioritize the goals of
their corporate parent (i.e., strategic performance in general and innovation performance in particular), which is in line with recent
M. Schückes et al. Journal of Business Venturing 40 (2025) 106438
20
endeavors into the performance effects of CVC (cf. Huang and Madhavan, 2020). In our investigation, we did not encounter a single
CVC unit that solely focused on nancial metrics (similar to ndings by Souitaris et al., 2012). Performance was always considered
either purely strategic in nature or a mix of strategic and nancial performance. This assumption leaves room for further inquiries into
the dual strategic and nancial objectives of CVC units.
Although our detailed case descriptions provide valuable insights into the cases we investigated, we can only partially eliminate
alternative explanations. We acknowledge that our research might not encompass all potential factors that could account for high or
low performance. Therefore, we suggest that further research could explore other conditions (e.g., compensation schemes, emphasis on
corporate or external staff) not considered in our study. We assumed a signicant degree of agency of CVC units and their management.
Empirically, the degree of agency varied across cases, and unsurprisingly was often greater in those CVC units that were more mature
and enjoyed more independence. Across all cases, however, we found multiple signs of agency, but we acknowledge the possibility of
cases where this might not exist. Regarding the nature of the agency CVC units possess, discussions surrounding “embedded agency”in
the literature on institutional change and institutional entrepreneurship (Battilana and D'Aunno, 2009;Greenwood and Suddaby,
2006;Seo and Creed, 2002) offer an interesting arena for future investigation (Dalpiaz et al., 2016;Walker et al., 2014).
The purpose of this study was not to create a typology of CVC units, but rather to understand the different mechanisms and
structural arrangements CVC units leverage at the interface with the corporate parent and stress the heterogeneity inherent in these
CVC units that make it difcult to generalize and quantitatively compare their outcomes. We believe that a congurational approach
can extend recent qualitative inquiries that already tapped into CVC heterogeneity (Basu et al., 2016a;Shankar et al., 2024;Souitaris
and Zerbinati, 2014) by providing a more holistic view of CVC units and build a bridge to quantitative inquiries. However, we
acknowledge that our methodological approach is both a limitation and an opportunity for future research. Organizations are
increasingly confronted with a multiplicity of demands through a more diverse stakeholder base and an ever-increasing complexity
(Battilana et al., 2017). The more complexity these organizations face, the more difcult measuring their performance becomes.
Hence, measuring the performance of CVC units is challenging, and our approach (which resembles that of Waldkirch et al. (2021))
leaves room for future research to create instruments that are even better able to capture CVC performance. For example, while we
operationalize the innovation outcomes of CVC units through established measures and in line with theoretical denitions, our
outcome conditions, each consisting of three distinct variables, and our qualitative coding process may not fully capture the results of
the CVC units' activities. This limitation is particularly relevant in the case of explorative innovation performance due to its “less
certain outcomes, longer time horizons, and more diffuse effects”(March, 1991, p. 73), which complicate measurement and make it
more difcult to distinguish between mere efforts versus actual implementation and resulting performance-enhancing effects. How-
ever, the use of measures based on typically much less ambiguous quantitative longitudinal data structures, such as patent data
assessment, also would carry signicant disadvantages, as they provide only a partial view of rms' technology activities (since not all
inventions are patented) (Ugur et al., 2024). We therefore invite other researchers to use our study design as a starting point to develop
even more comprehensive and precise indicators to measure CVC units' innovation performance in particular and strategic perfor-
mance in general. Such comprehensive measures may also include more prominently indirect and oftentimes neglected pathways to
strategic benets through CVC units' activities for their parent rms, such as increased capabilities to sense and shape future op-
portunities, the assessment of new markets and eld domains, and other long-term and spillover effects (Danneels and Miller, 2023).
However, we nd such alternative measures for performance in CVC to be rather complementary and not mutually exclusive to the
ones chosen in this study, as explorative innovation, in particular, refers to more long-term oriented effects (March, 1991). It would
also be interesting if other researchers extended our study approach to strategic effects only secondarily related to innovation, such as
positive signaling effects through an improved corporate image or the promotion of entrepreneurship within the rm (Ernst et al.,
2005).
While the fsQCA methodology chosen for this paper allows us to develop detailed insights into the construction of individual
successful CVC units and the inductive generation of theory, this does not mean that these insights are generalizable to the average CVC
unit (Douglas et al., 2020). Thus, we suggest that other researchers should attempt to replicate some of our ndings across a larger
number of cases, using more inferential types of statistics, in order to develop insights with a higher degree of generalizability and to
ensure causality among the independent variables, their interaction, and dependent performance variables. Another shortcoming of
our fsQCA approach is its limited ability to control a large number of optional CVC designs and potential success determinants (e.g.,
Frey and Kanbach, 2023), as the number of conditional variables should be kept low to ensure parsimony and interpretability of the
results (Greckhamer et al., 2018) as well as to avoid problems due to limited diversity (Ragin, 1987;Soda and Furnari, 2012).
While our methodological approach is not able to provide longitudinal arguments, our results show congurations that are pre-
dominantly present in younger or more mature CVC units, suggesting shifts among the congurations as CVC units mature over time. It
would be interesting to understand what triggers changes in CVC units' structural arrangements and processes and what effects are the
result of such changes. We expect such inquiries to be able to provide a more nuanced view of corporate venturing strategies (Covin
and Miles, 2007) and organizational learning (Argote et al., 2020). The evolution of CVC units would also be of interest to institutional
scholars studying eld-level mechanisms. Some of our respondents pointed to the fact that in order to differentiate from IVC funds,
CVC units created new value propositions to startups (Gutmann, 2019;Huang and Madhavan, 2020) that IVC funds have begun to
mimic themselves. While prior research has largely looked at how and when corporations adapt to the IVC logic (Gaba and Meyer,
M. Schückes et al. Journal of Business Venturing 40 (2025) 106438
21
2008), it is intriguing to understand under which circumstances these adaptation mechanisms reverse. Additionally, it's important to
note that any research comparing organizations at different maturity stages might grapple with survivorship bias. Acknowledging this,
our study adopted a broader calibration for the maturity dimension, encompassing practices from both the CVC and IVC domains.
Lastly, our inquiry focused on the structural interface between CVC units and the corporate parent. The study of this dyadic
relationship could be extended beyond organizational structures and extend to a triadic relationship and incorporate portfolio com-
panies into their analysis to understand which startups thrive under which CVC conguration. In this regard, it could also be possible to
include a portfolio view on the investments the CVC unit undertakes and understand how portfolio companies use buffering and
bridging in their interactions with the corporate investor. Extant studies on corporate incubation already outline that new ventures can
prot from being protected by sponsor resources (Amezcua et al., 2013).
5.3. Managerial implications
When designing CVC units for innovation performance, there are several crucial managerial implications that suggest practitioners
ought to adjust their operational strategies accordingly. Our ndings underscore that heterogeneity is a dening characteristic of CVC
congurations. Aligning the structural arrangements of the CVC unit is vital to facilitate productive exchanges and ensure support from
both the top management team and business units. This alignment substantially impacts performance outcomes, depending on the CVC
unit's strategic orientation (exploitation vs. exploration) and its maturity. Hence, practitioners are advised to avoid the temptation of
applying a “one-size-ts-all”model to CVC setups. The organizational structure of CVCs is complex and cannot be simplied,
regardless of whether their objective is exploitative or explorative innovation. Instead, there are several optimal setups depending on
contextual factors. Our research highlights the concept of buffering and bridging as an essential aspect of CVC management. Although
CVC units may benet from some autonomy (buffering), especially from BUs, it is crucial to establish strategic links (bridging) with the
corporate interface, especially in terms of collaborative and leadership aspects. This insight should encourage practitioners to rethink
the structure and objectives of their CVC unit and to pursue a setup that helps the CVC unit skillfully navigate the sometimes-
conicting demands of the corporate parent and the IVC domain.
Funding
This research did not receive any specic grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-prot sectors. We
acknowledge that Benedikt Unger is a recipient of a PhD scholarship from the Hanns-Seidel-Foundation, which is funded by the
German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Magnus Schückes: Writing –review &editing, Writing –original draft, Visualization, Investigation, Conceptualization. Benedikt
Unger: Writing –review &editing, Formal analysis. Tobias Gutmann: Validation, Supervision, Investigation, Data curation, Writing –
review &editing. Gerwin Fels: Validation, Software, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Data curation.
Declaration of competing interest
None.
Data availability
The data that has been used is condential.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Michael Woywode, Patricia H. Thornton, and Matthias Waldkirch for their valuable feedback on
earlier versions of this paper. They also extend their gratitude to the participants of the 36th EGOS Colloquium and the 80th Annual
Meeting of the Academy of Management for their insightful input.
Appendix A. Calibration key
M. Schückes et al. Journal of Business Venturing 40 (2025) 106438
22
0 0.33 0.67 1
CVC-TMT
interface
Vertical
autonomy
Corporate TMT approval
required for all deals
No formal corporate TMT approval required
but corporate TMT has a non-controlling vote
in the investment committee
CVC unit has full vertical autonomy over
investment decisions within certain search elds up
to certain investment size threshold
CVC unit is permitted to invest within
certain search elds without TMT approval
Leadership
involvement
No direct reporting to the
corporate TMT
Binary Direct reporting to the corporate TMT
CVC-BU
interface
Horizontal
autonomy
BU approval required for all
deals
No formal approval required but BU must
show interest in collaborating with the startup
CVC unit has full horizontal autonomy regarding
investment decisions within certain search elds
but BU is consulted prior to an investment
CVC unit has full horizontal autonomy
regarding investment decisions within
certain search elds from the BU
Business
development
team
CVC unit does not have a
dedicated business
development team
Binary CVC unit has a dedicated business
development team
Contextual
factors
Maturity (age of
CVC unit)
<6 years ≥6 years; <12 years ≥12 years; <18 years ≥18 years
M. Schückes et al. Journal of Business Venturing 40 (2025) 106438
23
Appendix B. Calibration of dimensions
Case
ID
CVC-TMT CVC-BU
Vertical autonomy Reporting structure Horizontal autonomy Business development team
1“We have a quorum or a majority
of votes within the venture's unit.
So, we have the ability to do deals
ourselves.”
“We can do up to 10-million-dollar
initial investment entirely within
the group. For anything above that
we've got a growth board that we
go up to. That includes the heads of
the business units where we get
sign off for larger investments. But
that really is fairly rare.”
“[The CEO of the CVC unit] is the
chief innovation ofcer for all of
[the corporate parent] although
she still retains the CEO position of
the CVC unit; she's still CEO of the
CVC unit. Now the funding for it
and the support for its existence
continues to come from the CEO at
the highest level of the corporate.”
“The business units have one vote
on the investment committee.
There are ve votes, the business
unit has one (…) So, we do get
their input but (…) they don't
control the vote.”
“The account managers own the
investments from cradle to grave.
They bring it to the investment
committee for approval. They are
responsible for the ongoing
monitoring. They will sit on the
boards or the observer positions
within the investments and they
will also be responsible for the
interaction between the startups
and the business units.”
0.67 1 0.67 0
2“But I would say the strategy is
being owned and optimized …by
the [CVC unit] not by the corporate
parent.”
“[The corporate parent says] here
you have 1 billion euros or 200
million euros every year. What do
you do with this money is best
decided by you because you are the
investment expert.”
“The [CVC unit] reports to the
board of [the corporate parent]
which allows us to communicate
directly.”
“The investment decision …is
made by the partners [of the CVC
unit].”
“So, you typically have one person
within the [business development]
team who is …responsible for the
startup [and] …works very closely
on actual products and on a project
with the startup. [In addition] there
is always one [investment] team
member responsible for the
investment.”
0.67 1 1 1
3“At the end of the day, it's within
the investment team and the CEO
that the decisions are taken. The
CEO does the approval, all the
time.”
“The boss of the CVC unit reports to
the CEO and the CFO.”
“[The strategy] comes directly
from the CEO, and we work with
the business units, and because, as
I said earlier, we really want to
stay close to the market, when we
do an investment.”
“I cover the ecosystem, and [the rest
of the team] are more experts on
vertical markets; we have someone
who does gaming; we have someone
who does design, mobile business,
and data centers, and high-
performance computing (…) and we
have someone creating
collaborations between the
corporate and the startups.”
0 1 1 1
4“We have an investment
committee, which is actually the
investment decision body. It's
composed of our CFO, our head of
legal, our head of nance (…)
Everything which comes into the
investment committee has already
the approval of the business units,
even though nobody of the
business units sits in this
investment committee.”
“[The CVC unit] reports, on the one
hand, to the CFO, and then also to
the business guys - the board
members of the business.”
“[The CVC unit] is a corporate
organization, which is one level
beyond C-level.”
“The business units are heavily
involved, because when we invest,
and if we consider an investment,
we also need to get the buy-in
from the business.”
“We have set up our activities in two
different paths. We have our
business responsibilities where it is
[about] focusing on the strategic
value coming from the corporate
[and we have people responsible]
when it comes to the investment,
when it comes to due diligence,
negotiation of term sheets, and nal
contract.”
0 1 0 1
5“In the investment committee, it is
[the CEO of the corporate parent]
and me and two outside advisors.
And this investment committee
then gives the investment manager
a mandate to negotiate a certain
term sheet.”
“[The CVC unit] reports to the
group CEO.”
“There are three pillars below the
holding. It's two business units
and it is the [CVC unit]. And it's
not that we have to support the
business units. [The CVC unit] is
one independent pillar that has to
be relevant on their own.”
“[We] have two managing partners
…who are in charge of running the
company (…) and we have four
guys who are regionally and
technically focused.”
0.33 1 1 0
6“Depending on the amount, we can
either make the decision ourselves
…within our investment team.
When we want to invest beyond a
certain threshold amount, we
would then approach our
investment committee (…) two-
thirds of the investments go
without the investment
committee.”
“We report to one of our board
members, so to a member of [the
corporate parent's] executive
board.”
“Depending on the amount, we
can either make the decision
ourselves …within our investment
team. When we want to invest
beyond a certain threshold
amount, we would then approach
our investment committee (…)
two-thirds of the investments go
without the investment
committee.”
“We have team members who
basically focus on deal ow and
investments (…) but we do not have
a dedicated portfolio development
team.”
0.67 1 0.67 0
(continued on next page)
M. Schückes et al. Journal of Business Venturing 40 (2025) 106438
24
(continued)
Case
ID
CVC-TMT CVC-BU
Vertical autonomy Reporting structure Horizontal autonomy Business development team
7“The Chairman, the deputy CEO of
the Group [are in the investment
committee]. They make the
investment decision.”
“[The venture unit-CEO] reports to
…[a business unit] head We are
not reporting to the CFO or the
nance. We are reporting to a
function that both manages all
connected things within [the
corporate parent] but also has a lot
of Innovation Labs, et cetera. We're
under one of these development
areas that I've talked about.”
“We do involve the business units
[but] we don't need [a formal
approval].”
“We manage [the startup] from an
ownership perspective. (…) We can
also help them navigate internally,
et cetera, and we have a small team
that manages the relationship with
the [corporate].”
0.33 0 0.67 1
8“We have one committee, where
we have to present all ideas that we
want to do. (…) This committee
consists of two-thirds of the Group
board, and the chief strategy
ofcer, chief digital ofcer, head of
M&A, head of legal, and so on.”
“We have two managing directors,
and one reports to the CFO, and one
reports to the CTO.”
“We don't need to get [the
business unit's] buy-in, so it's not
that, in the end, they need to sign
a paper saying, ‘Hey, I want to
work with this startup.’”
“We have basically two streams
within the team. We have the
classical investment-management
roles that are the guys who look
after the investments from a
nancial perspective, and we have
one stream called venture
development (…) where it's more
about leveraging the strategic
combination between the startups
and the group.”
0 1 1 1
9“We have an investment committee
that is comprised of the Chief
Technology Ofcer, the head of
operations and a relevant business
unit manager. They approve a deal.
Above a certain dollar threshold, it
goes up to the CEO and the CFO.”
“We report up through the head of
R&D which is our [corporate] CTO,
Chief Technology Ofcer.”
“The way we structure the deals is
that we always have a head of the
investment from the [corporate]
side, and then someone who is
supporting it from the business
unit side or from R&D.”
“We do not have a dedicated
development team.”
0 0 0 0
10 “The business area needs to go to
the investment community with us
to defend that investment.”
“In the investments committee, as
members, there is my boss, and
myself. He's the chief digital
commercial ofcer of [the
corporate parent] (…) And then we
have the guy responsible for
strategy and corporate
development.”
“My boss is the chief innovation
ofcer. Then we have his boss. He's
the chief digital commercial ofcer
of [the corporate parent].”
“The question is: Do we have a
business function? Do you have a
working plan for that company?”
“The business unit is not a
member of the committee, but we
invite each business unit,
according to the opportunity that
we are evaluating.”
“[I do not have a business
development team] in my team, but
…there is a team that
organizationally is [part of a
separate unit], but they work for us.
(…) Their job is to gather the
companies and have them work
with [the corporate]. They don't
report to me. They report into my
colleague, who manages [the
separate unit].”
“We are not into [the startups] day-
to-day. Usually, we get involved if
things are good, or if things are
bad.”
0 0 0.33 0
11 “The VC committee [consists of
the] CTO, CFO [and the] chief
strategy ofcer.”
“[The CVC unit] reports to the VC
committee [that consists of the]
CTO, CFO [and the] chief strategy
ofcer.”
“There is no link in decision-
making to business units, so we
don't need a sponsor or a buy-in,
so it's really set up at arm's
length.”
“There's no one allowed being in
the committee that actually has
operative responsibility for a
certain business unit because then
you would actually bring people
into a conict of interest.”
“No, we don't have [a] split
[between investment managers and
development managers] as of
today.”
0 1 1 0
12 “Again, we could make an
investment decision as a venture
team and say, ‘Hey, we want to do
an investment in this deal. We can't
do that investment until we get the
advisory board sign off’, but they
sign off on the strategic relevance.
(…) The advisory board consists of
“We're part of the research and
organization group and report
directly to the CTO.”
“We need to get [the business
unit] to support a deal, but it
doesn't require that there is some
sort of dened agreement with the
business unit. We need the
business unit to say, ‘Hey, this is
the type of stuff, why we're
excited about this startup, here's
“We've got …people who are …
internal consultants …who try and
help guide things to business units
or understand what the business
units are looking for innovation or
where they could provide benets.
[And] we have a team that's more
on the investment side.”
(continued on next page)
M. Schückes et al. Journal of Business Venturing 40 (2025) 106438
25
(continued)
Case
ID
CVC-TMT CVC-BU
Vertical autonomy Reporting structure Horizontal autonomy Business development team
people from the C-level of the
corporation.”
the type of things we can do with
the startup.’”
1 1 0.33 1
13 “For investments our individual
wire is about $15 million (…)
above we need our President of
[the CVC unit]'s, and our CFO's
approval, but below $15 million,
our CFO and [the President] have
delegated that to the investment
committee.”
“For us, the reporting relationship
has generally been to the CEO.
That's the way it is now; a few
exceptions.”
“We have a six-person investment
committee, myself and four other
senior managing directors, plus a
representative of our CFO who is
the controller for [the CVC unit].”
“We have investment professionals
…[and] we have portfolio
development [managers].”
0.67 1 1 1
14 “We need CEO management board
approval.”
“Ultimately, we report to our CFO.” “We require business unit
approval for the deal.”
“I've seen many, many CVCs say
that's a disadvantage that you
have to have the business unit's
approval. I disagree. I disagree- I
strongly disagree.”
“We are in the process of setting up
a [development team] …I think
that's something really benecial to
have, especially once the portfolio
grows.”
0 1 0 0
15 “Pretty early in the deal
assessments, we get the advisory
board involved. They conrm the
strategic t. Then, the decisions
whether we invest in the startup is
done by our team.”
“[The investments are] proposed
by [the CVC unit] and approved by
the advisory board, and effectively,
in the end, also our CEO, the
[corporate parent's] CEO, has to
put his signature underneath.”
“[The CVC unit] reports to the
CEO.”
“The business unit also gets
involved early to conrm the
strategic relevance for [the
corporate].”
“For the last year and a bit, we have
a [development] team…and their
focus is indeed only helping [the
corporate parent] to cooperate with
startups. They are not part of the
investment team.”
0 1 0.33 1
16 “We have to have a business
sponsor and a champion in our
investment committee. Those are
the ones that make it over the line.”
“There has to be the COO …
associated with championing the
deal that we're bringing forward,
because it's the COO who has to
raise their hand and say we're
going to deploy this technology, …
or this is critical to helping create a
future business for [the corporate
parent]. There's a real business
person in the room responsible for
some aspect of [the corporate
parent] operations that has to
stand in the room and champion
the deal.”
“We essentially sit right under the
executive ofce. It also took time
and some successes to generate that
kind of visibility that showed that
venturing could be a powerful
tool.”
“Now, it's held at the level of the
CEO, but that took a while to get
there.”
“We have to have a sponsor [from
the business unit], and they have
to sign off on it.”
“So far, we do not have a dedicated
business development team that
predominantly creates
collaborations between the startups
and [the corporate parent].”
0.33 1 0 0
17 “The …approval process is we get
a signature by the head of the
corporate VC team …Then there is
…[the division head of the]
Strategy and Technology Division.”
“There is no corporate C-level
required to approve a deal.”
“Within [the corporate], on group
level, there's a division called
Strategy and Technology Division
that we belong to.”
“The head of the [strategy and
technology] division, he reports to
the board of directors, [the chief
innovation ofcer], within [the
corporate].”
“The business units do not need to
give a formal approval. [For
example, it is enough if] we nd
the business unit is …saying,
‘Okay, this is a very interesting
technology.’”
“[We have open innovation
managers] …that have the
opportunity to create certain POCs
for startups.”
0.67 0 0.33 1
18 “[In the investment committee]
there is the CFO, the CSO, and our
CEO is aware of the investments.”
“[The CVC unit is] two levels below
strategy.”
“If we're doing it in collaboration
with, [the business unit] then we
[need an approval]. In the other
cases, we just lay down the
strategic benets without formal
approval from a certain business
“There's no split between an
investment manager and a
development manager.”
(continued on next page)
M. Schückes et al. Journal of Business Venturing 40 (2025) 106438
26
(continued)
Case
ID
CVC-TMT CVC-BU
Vertical autonomy Reporting structure Horizontal autonomy Business development team
unit.”
“Having the stamp of approval
from [the business units] saying,
‘We need this,’will streamline
that conversation quite a bit.”
0 0 0.33 0
19 “Our investment board is made up
of [corporate] senior executives…
They give a thumbs-up or thumbs
down.”
“We have three of our commercial
leads in [the investment
committee] - our top two business
unit leaders, …our regional
business unit leaders. We have our
CFO. We have one of our corporate
counsel.”
“The fund reports into our head of
strategic planning, who reports to
the CFO.”
“We do not need formal approval
from the business units.”
“We do, obviously, talk about [a
startup-business unit
collaboration plan] before the
investment, but it's all done post-
investment and separate from the
investment. We want to keep
those very, very separate.”
“We have employed one person that
is responsible for creating the
collaborations between the startup
and the business unit.”
0 0 0.67 1
20 “I…have a monthly review with
our investment committee, which
is the chief executive ofcer, chief
technology ofcer, and chief
nancial ofcer of the [corporate
parent] company …They approve
the deals that we bring forward.”
“As of today, there is no direct
reporting to the board level.”
“The business units are consulted
by that portfolio development
team …but we don't ask for their
blessing.”
“We think of the team in two units -
an investing team and a portfolio
development team.”
0 0 0.67 1
21 “The nal vote going to the execs
would be our CFO, CEO, CTO …
[They] have to sign off on the
investment to get it approved.”
“Right now, we report to the [head
of] strategy and M&A [which
reports to the CEO].”
“Not that [the business units]
have veto power or that they're
dictating the areas we can invest
in.”
“It's just double checking [with
the business units], making sure
that we're not stepping on
anybody's toes internally because
there's a lot of programs going on
at any one time at [the corporate
parent].”
“We have a dedicated business
development [team].”
0 0 0.67 1
22 “At the corporate level, we have to
have the CEO and CFO support …
we've got to get the CEO and CFO
on board [to get an approval]”
“No deal …will get done without
the support of the President of
business units. We will need his
support, which we have a process
for getting that support.”
“When you go to [the BUs] for
approval, the perception is that
they slow you down, potentially,
making less than ideal decisions.
On the other hand, you then have
the buy-in of that team who will
then support you, and who knows
why you did the investment and
should be supportive of it in the
future.”
“[The head of the venture group]
reports to the CEO of the [the
corporate].”
“No, we don't [have a dedicated
business development team]. That's
a great function to have on
corporate venture teams. We don't.”
0 1 0 0
23 “No one from the top management
team needs to approve a deal.”
“[The CVC unit] reports directly to
the CFO.”
“We don't require business unit
approval or a sponsor for an
investment decision. We make
those decisions within the venture
team.”
“We have a platform team that
works with our portfolio companies
on business development efforts;
nding partners, working on pricing
strategy, things like that.”
1 1 1 1
24 “We make it all of the investment
decisions solely within the venture
team.”
“There are three board members
that the CVC unit reports to. This is
the CFO of the [corporate], this is
the board member for our
development and research area.
And there is a board member that
has a quite broad role being
responsible for all of the brands and
all of the digital businesses within
the [corporate]. The fourth
member that we are reporting to is
the leader of the [corporate]
strategy.”
“We make all of the investment
decisions solely within the
venture team.”
“We have a division of work as in
every fund, a hierarchy where there
are partners, there are principals
and associates focusing on our…
focusing on our investment
activities. Then we have operational
roles such as CFO, team assistance.
And then we have the platform
team, focusing on the value-adding
activities. These teams are split.”
(continued on next page)
M. Schückes et al. Journal of Business Venturing 40 (2025) 106438
27
(continued)
Case
ID
CVC-TMT CVC-BU
Vertical autonomy Reporting structure Horizontal autonomy Business development team
1 1 1 1
25 “We have three full-time members
of the investment committee,
which is the Vice President of
M&A, a managing director, and the
CTO of [the corporate]. Then we
have two members rotate every
two years.”
“[The CVC unit] is under the M&A
department, which hangs under the
CFO.”
“The investment decision is not
going to sit with the business unit,
it is going to sit within the VC
team and, obviously, the
investment committee, who we
present it to.”
“We are still too young to have
developed in that direction and
created no business development
team.”
0.33 0 1 0
26 “No one from the [top
management] team itself is a
member of the Investment
Committee. Instead, we have a so-
called Advisory Board. The
investments are presented there by
the managing director but they are
only informed.”
“Report current deal ow to
advisory board composed of
members from C-level and TMT.”
“We collaborate closely with
various business units to ensure
our investments align with the
broader business strategy but we
still are the only ones who decide
where we invest and we do not
need consent from the
businesses.”;“We informally help
portfolio companies connect them
to our core business, but we don't
have an integrated business
development team focused
exclusively on connecting to the
core.”
“We have an integrated business
development team that supports the
development and growth of our
portfolio companies.”
1 1 1 1
27 “Our CVC unit has full autonomy
when it comes to investment
decisions. We have earned the trust
of the parent corporation and
operate independently.”
“The strategic decisions and
ventures are closely tied to the
overall objectives of the
organization.”
“We are independent from the
core business. Sometimes when
we need expertise from a BU we
contact someone and collaborate
with them. But this is rather an
exception. If we would coordinate
everything with the core business
we would be too slow.”
“Our dedicated business
development team is committed to
fostering growth and driving
business development for our
portfolio companies.”
1 1 0.67 1
28 “In the end, we need the approval
of others. In fact, depending on
how high the investment is, we
would need the consent of two
[corporate top management team
members].”
“We report to and maintain a direct
line of communication with the
TMT, keeping them informed about
our investment activities and the
progress of our portfolio
companies.”
“We have found that we do not
need a sponsor to get the
investment approved, even if it is
an exciting topic. However,
because of this strong strategic
alignment, it is not easy to decide
what to do with it and this is why
we still involve the business units
here and there.”
“We have a dedicated team that
focuses on nurturing our portfolio
companies and helping them realize
their full potential.”
0.33 1 0.33 1
29 “All our investment decisions are
subject to the approval of the top
management team. Their strategic
insights are invaluable to our
investment strategy.”
“There is no formalized reporting
structure to the TMT in place.”
“While we maintain a small level
of autonomy, we still often consult
with specic business units that
have relevant expertise for certain
investments.”
“In our structure, each investment
manager is responsible for
supporting and growing their
respective portfolio companies, so
no, we do not have dedicated
business development
professionals.”
0 0 0.33 0
30 “Our investment decisions are
guided by the top management
team. Their strategic vision forms
the backbone of our investment
strategy.”
“We report directly report to the
CFO.”
“We need a link to core business to
make an investment decision.
They are part of our due diligence
process.”
“We have a dedicated CVC team
that works to develop our portfolio
companies and help them reach
their full potential.”
0 1 0 1
Appendix C. Illustrative GMET coding
M. Schückes et al. Journal of Business Venturing 40 (2025) 106438
28
Generic Membership Evaluation Template (GMET) case number: 18
Generic Membership Evaluation Template (GMET) for: CVC innovation performance
Overall case description from outcome
perspective
Case 18 is a corporate venture fund of a multinational telecommunications company that invests primarily in areas of the parent company's expertise, with both a short and
long-term perspective. It has made 39 investments with
€
350 million under management.
Dimensions Context-specic description Direction/effect
on membership
Illustrative quote(s)
Exploration
Creation of options on emerging technologies
for parent rm (Hill et al., 2009)
Case 18 is investing into future-oriented technologies and markets. Positive I think we could do the diligence on that end, because we're looking for
results. We could expect KPIs to identify and manage that. If it was more
core technology, like, let's say, the infrastructure technologies, we would
then need a lot more technological support, because it goes into a lot
more expertise, and depth than what we could potentially provide. The
technology diligence, I think, requires collaboration on both ends, but
who takes the majority of ownership will depend on that opportunity,
and the type of need, and how deep it touches our core tech.
Investments in disruptive technologies that
potentially cannibalize existing
technologies for parent rm (Hill and
Birkinshaw, 2014)
Case 18 was set up with a certain autonomy to make investments in
disruptive technologies and avoid having buy-in from the business.
Positive If we're too close to a business unit, then the types of deals, and
opportunities we look for are too close-term. It's not disruptive. It may or
may not provide a lot of insight, like future-forward thinking, because
we're looking too closely for alignment with the business unit. Having
the autonomy to invest in these sectors that our companies operate in,
and investing outside of our scope, and investing in potentially
disruptive, or competitive companies may be a good thing. Again, this is
where I talked about the company's culture, risk appetite, and what
they're looking for - the objective of their investment. Some groups are
more closely aligned to existing business units, because their industry is
being threatened. Whereas certain industries, they know that new
technologies are coming, like AI, and blockchain, et cetera, where they're
still considered frontier technologies.
Investments in (technological/market) domains
relatively unrelated to the current
corporate domains (Hill et al., 2009;
March, 1991)
Case 18 invests in both technology companies that t the parent's core,
but also beyond. Within the evaluation of venture technologies, it
collaborates with different people from the parent organization to make
sure it is strategically relevant.
Positive We're looking at investing in new innovative technologies, and/or
business models, so, again, it focuses on the fringe …being forward
thinking on where the industry is changing, and investing in those areas,
so that we will be better prepared as the landscape changes.
Exploitation
Improvement of parent rm's operational
excellence (improvement in product quality
or reduction in cost)(Weber et al., 2016)
Case 18 has established formats to identify problems within the parent
organization, and this paves the way for scouting ventures in these areas
that help tackle these problems. However, no actual performance
improvements stated.
Negative I joined to help build this program, and then, internally, things shifted,
and then this new LP structure thing came about. Before we could fully
execute on that, or even push it forward, we had to stop, and slow things
down until we understood how our investment activities are going to
change. Having said that, I think a lot of this process will still be
applicable to help build strategic partnerships and look at ways to create
strategic alignments between a startup company of various shapes, and
sizes, and stages included, with our business units; essentially, taking a
more consultative selling approach to work together. You could call it
design thinking if you'd like, but really identifying the problems, and
then sourcing companies accordingly.
Increased recognition in rest of corporation of
the importance of new business
development (Hill et al., 2009)
Case 18 is very diligent in evaluating how the venture can help increase
recognition in the rest of the parent rm of the importance of new
Positive The needs of the startup obviously is more business development, and
partnership would be my guess, but without being able to understand the
needs of the corporate, it's really hard to say if this is a t or not. I think
(continued on next page)
M. Schückes et al. Journal of Business Venturing 40 (2025) 106438
29
(continued)
Generic Membership Evaluation Template (GMET) case number: 18
Generic Membership Evaluation Template (GMET) for: CVC innovation performance
Overall case description from outcome
perspective
Case 18 is a corporate venture fund of a multinational telecommunications company that invests primarily in areas of the parent company's expertise, with both a short and
long-term perspective. It has made 39 investments with
€
350 million under management.
Dimensions Context-specic description Direction/effect
on membership
Illustrative quote(s)
business development, and how the parent organization can help the
venture.
the rst step really is to facilitate conversations. I think that's the most
important thing is let's start putting our ideas, and thoughts around
together, and then guring out what we could do with this together. It
has to go through this process from facilitating conversations, sharing
ideas, then to slowly formulate a problem or opportunity, and going
down this process. I think we need to start with that before we could
make any prescriptive comments. Your question, I think, is more like a
one, or this or the other type binary thing. My answer to you is it
depends, but we have to slowly create alignment, and interest before we
could do anything in any of these spaces, regardless if it's investments
and/or business development deals.
Investments in (technological/market) domains
related to the current corporate domains (
Hill et al., 2009;March, 1991)
Case 18 has established formats (design-thinking-driven) to identify
problems and set up a consultative selling approach to bring their
ventures to the business units, which drives the development of new
products in existing markets, but also shapes the way these products are
built.
Positive Before we could fully execute on that, or even push it forward, we had to
stop, and slow things down until we understood how our investment
activities are going to change. Having said that, I think a lot of this
process will still be applicable to help build strategic partnerships and
look at ways to create strategic alignments between a startup company of
various shapes, and sizes, and stages included, with our business units;
essentially, taking a more consultative selling approach to work
together. You could call it design thinking if you'd like, but really
identifying the problems, and then sourcing companies accordingly.
Outcome Explore Exploit
Set membership in 3-value fuzzy-set 3 2
Calibrated value 1.00 0.67
Qualitative anchors: Meanings attached to fuzzy values
3 Overall intense positive dimensions
2 Intense or various positive dimensions with very few negative dimensions
1 Intense or various negative dimensions with very few positive dimensions
0 Overall intense and various negative dimensions
M. Schückes et al. Journal of Business Venturing 40 (2025) 106438
30
Appendix D. Analysis of necessary conditions
Conditions Outcomes
Exploit Explore ~Exploit ~Explore
Consistency Coverage Consistency Coverage Consistency Coverage Consistency Coverage
Vertical autonomy 0.350000 0.665000 0.491785 0.868000 0.484545 0.533000 0.240486 0.297000
~Vertical autonomy 0.754211 0.716500 0.601700 0.531000 0.695455 0.382500 0.893117 0.551500
Direct reporting 0.613158 0.582500 0.774504 0.683500 0.759091 0.417500 0.512551 0.316500
~Direct reporting 0.386842 0.735000 0.225496 0.398000 0.240909 0.265000 0.487449 0.602000
Horizontal autonomy 0.613158 0.685294 0.716714 0.744118 0.786364 0.508824 0.565992 0.411176
~Horizontal autonomy 0.560526 0.819231 0.432861 0.587692 0.513636 0.434615 0.647773 0.615385
Business dev. team 0.543684 0.573889 0.603966 0.592222 0.697273 0.426111 0.594332 0.407778
~Business dev. team 0.456316 0.722500 0.396034 0.582500 0.302727 0.277500 0.405668 0.417500
Maturity (mature) 0.524737 0.680546 0.602833 0.726280 0.635455 0.477133 0.565182 0.476450
~Maturity (mature) 0.596842 0.738762 0.565439 0.650163 0.574546 0.411726 0.675304 0.543322
Appendix E. Summary of robustness checks
Robustness test Exploit Explore ~Exploit ~Explore
Young guided exploiters BU
collaborator
Young ambidextrous Autonomous
corporate explorer
|-None-| (Similar C3)
C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 C6 C7
Inclusion of lower PRI scores
(threshold: 0.5)
Identical Identical Identical Identical Identical Identical / Identical
Exclusion of lower PRI scores
(threshold: 0.75)
Identical Does not
appear
Identical Identical Identical Identical / Identical
Consistency cutoff at 0.85 Identical Does not
appear
Identical Identical Identical Identical / Does not
appear
Maturity in terms of 5 years VC
investment cycles
Very similar Does not
appear
Very similar Identical Identical Identical / Very similar
Split analysis for mature and
immature CVC units
Identical Identical Identical Identical Identical Identical / Identical
Ambidexterity check Does not
appear
Does not
appear
Does not
appear
Identical Identical Does not appear / /
~ Ambidexterity check / / / / / / / Identical
Notes: When comparing the results reported in the paper with the three robustness tests, we coded congurational solutions according to the cat-
egories developed by Meuer et al. (2015): identical if there is no change in either core or contributing condition; very similar if there is no directional
change in core condition or only further specication as the previous empty condition becomes directional, or vice versa; if the congurational
solution no longer appears in the robustness test, this was also indicated. Similar solutions (in case of directional change of core condition) or
somewhat similar solutions (most core conditions remain stable, but some core and contributing conditions change) were not observed; irrelevant
conditions for specic robustness check were marked with “/”.
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