Tapping into the knowledge of incumbents: The role of corporate venture capital investments and inventor mobility

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Research Summary: This article investigates the impact of corporate venture capital (CVC) investments and inventors' mobility on the extent to which new ventures use incumbents' knowledge resources as inputs for their innovation activities. Our findings suggest that ventures receiving CVC investments draw less on investors' knowledge, while inventor mobility increases the extent to which an incumbent's technological knowledge is used by recipient ventures. Ventures combining CVC investments and inventor mobility from the same incumbent are selected for drawing less on that incumbent's patents, but these citation flows increase in the period after investment and the inventors' hiring events are combined. Our results, thus, unveil the organizational complexity associated with the individual and combined roles of CVC investments and inventor mobility in determining new ventures' innovation behaviors. Managerial Summary: New ventures often acquire resources from large established firms to foster development and success. Among others, research has primarily focused on equity investments—corporate venture capital and the hiring of employees—in particular inventors. While prior work has studied the impact of these two resources in terms of success and performance, we look more specifically at whether these two particular resources, individually and combined, could function as channels through which new ventures can access and use established firms' knowledge assets. Our analyses suggest that ventures receiving CVC investments draw less on investors' knowledge, while those hiring inventors draw more. Ventures combining these resources show an increased use of the incumbent firm's knowledge assets in the period after investment and hiring are combined.

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