Francesco Di Lorenzo

In a digital world increasingly characterized by new business opportunities and challenges driven by the proliferation of pervasive digital technologies, companies are more than ever called to act entrepreneurially. This scenario has raised important questions at the intersection of corporate entrepreneurship (CE) and digital technologies, as we currently lack a comprehensive understanding on the implications of digital technologies in CE strategy, related antecedents, processes, and outcomes. To fill this gap, our study takes stock of the extant literature on CE in the digital age. Through a review of 54 studies, we craft an integrative framework of CE in the digital age, articulated across six building blocks. Building on the proposed framework, we elaborate a research agenda for future research.

The effects of corporate venture capital (CVC) investments on ventures’ revenues and innovation-related outcomes depend on the characteristics of the investors and on the dynamics of the investment process. Recently, venture financing literature has highlighted the importance of investment timing as a driver for investee ventures development and success. Building on the literatures on complementary assets and relative absorptive capacity, we explore how the timing of CVC investments affects ventures’ revenues and R&D intensity. Using a dataset of Norwegian ventures in knowledge-intensive industries, we find evidence for a differential effect of CVC investments when comparing a venture’s early- and late-stage, showing that investments received in late-stage increase ventures’ revenues, but decrease ventures’ R&D intensity. Further, we find that syndication with multiple CVC investors amplifies this effect. This study contributes to the understanding of the CVC-venture relationship and the impact on venture’s post-CVC outcomes.

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.