The Anatomy of a Corporate Venture Builder : Factors influencing Failure

Abstract

Digital transformation opens numerous opportunities for companies. To seize such opportunities, corporations look at startups and entrepreneurship, integrating new organizational forms and practices into their existing innovation management capabilities. Corporate startup programs, accelerators, incubators, venture builders, and CVC have gained momentum. This paper explores factors that affect the unsuccessful development of a corporate venture builder (CVB). CVB is an organizational unit that builds new ventures combining internal resources and external entrepreneurs. Relying on an in-depth case study of the experience of a Brazilian software firm during the three-year life of its CVB, which ended in 2019, we analyze which aspects of the company's innovation management capabilities affected the unsuccessful outcome. Our findings suggest that the lack of alignment between the CVB initiative and the company's top management was a critical determinant for discontinuity. While the new businesses management unit that has pulled the CVB aimed at rather explorative, long-term growth-oriented objectives, the Board of the company and its C-level expected relatively short-term results. This case provides insights into how current innovation management capabilities and related organizational forms deter the development of corporate venturing initiatives and interact with the entrepreneurial behavior of founders that participate in such endeavors.

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