Date of Award

Summer 8-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Program/Concentration

Business Administration - Strategic Management

Committee Director

Jing Zhang

Committee Member

Jay O’Toole

Committee Member

Andreas Schwab

Abstract

Large corporations often take minority ownership positions in startups through corporate venture capital (CVC) investments to explore emerging technologies and pursue financial returns. CVCs have the option to syndicate with other organizations to leverage their complementary resources and knowledge and mitigate risks. While prior research has extensively explored syndication among independent venture capitalists (IVCs), CVC syndication has so far received only limited research attention. This gap limits our understanding of how different syndication partners add value to the knowledge dimension in the context of CVC investments. This two-essay dissertation integrates the literature on knowledge-based theory and relation-based view of alliance formation and coopetition literature to examine the following research questions:

1) How do the industry and location of startup firms influence CVC syndication formation strategies with other CVC or IVC investors?

2) How do CVC partners’ features influence the CVC’s decision to invest in a different industry?

This dissertation focuses on CVC syndication strategies by investigating two fundamental topics: (1) the CVC's partnership choices between IVCs or other CVCs and (2) the preferred features of the CVC partners. Both essays use all CVC investment deals from 2001 to 2022 that involved at least one CVC partner whose parent corporation is (or was) listed in the U.S. S&P 500 index.

Essay 1 examines how the industry and location of the targeted startup firm influence the focal CVCs' partnership selection between IVCs and/or other CVCs. Drawing upon the knowledge-based theory of alliance literature, I argue that the two types of partners play distinctly different investment roles. While CVCs primarily seek IVCs to access their knowledge in investment deals, they syndicate with other CVCs to acquire industry-related knowledge. Specifically, this essay examines three key factors: (1) the industry distance between the CVC’s parent corporation and the startup firm, (2) the technology intensity of the startup firm's industry, and (3) the geographic location of the startup firm (U.S. domestic vs. foreign). I applied multinomial logit models to examine the likelihood of selecting among three investment options: investing alone, partnering with IVCs, or choosing CVC partners over the other two options.

Essay 2 focuses on CVC partners and examines how their features influence a CVC's probability of investing in startup firms' industries that are different from its parent corporation's core business. Building on the knowledge-based theory and relation-based view of alliance formation, along with the coopetition literature, I examine four CVC partner-related features: (1) whether a CVC partners' parent corporation is from the startup firm's industry and (2) whether a CVC partner has more prior investment experience in the startup firm's industry, (3) whether the investors have a repeated collaboration history, and (4) whether a CVC and its partner come from the same or a closely related industry. I applied a logit model to test the hypothesized relationships between CVC partner features and the probability of a CVC investing in a different industry.

This dissertation makes several theoretical contributions. First, it contributes to the under-researched field of CVC syndicate strategies by proposing a framework that examines the factors influencing CVCs’ selection of syndication partners. It also extends the knowledge-based theory of alliance formation by emphasizing the distinct roles of different types of partners associated with the parent corporation in achieving specific knowledge goals. Second, it offers a novel perspective on CVC partner-related knowledge in alliance formation. It extends the theory on how CVC partners facilitate knowledge sharing in syndication, an area that has been underexplored. Third, it adds a novel perspective to the literature on the relation-based view of alliance formation in the CVC–CVC syndication context.

In sum, the purpose of this dissertation is to fill gaps in the under-researched areas of CVC syndication strategy, specifically, CVCs’ partner selection and the features of CVC partners. The overall storyline begins in Essay 1, which investigates the choices CVCs make when they have the option to syndicate with other investors. While prior research has acknowledged CVC–IVC syndication, existing studies have not examined how partner selection decisions are made nor how the knowledge-seeking goals of CVCs influence their choice of different types of partners. Essay 2 builds on this, examining the relatively underexplored phenomenon of CVC–CVC syndication and how the features of these CVC partners influence investment decisions. Altogether, this dissertation aims to explain the CVC decision-making process in syndication, first, whether to syndicate and, if so, with whom; and second, in CVC–CVC syndicates, what CVC partner features drive such collaborations and how they affect a CVC’s decision to explore new industry opportunities.

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DOI

10.25777/srte-ba97

ISBN

9798293843565

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