Corporate venturing and value creation: A review and proposed framework

Over the past decade, companies worldwide have used corporate venturing (CV) as a means of revitalizing their operations, building new capabilities, and achieving strategic renewal, creating value for shareholders. Business interest in CV has stimulated academic interest in the topic, resulting in a rapidly growing but fragmented body of literature. Despite the growing international scholarly interest in CV, researchers have devoted little effort to integrating prior findings in a cumulative fashion. As a result, studies do not build upon one another, making it difficult to gauge the progress being made in addressing the fundamental research questions related to CV. In this paper, we examine the literature on CV seeking to synthesize, integrate and link its key findings. To do so, we analyze this literature over the past decade to identify its major themes and research findings setting the stage for greater coherence in future research on CV. We give special attention to the challenges and rewards of theory building in future CV research. Our review clearly shows that CV is an area of scholarly inquiry that has important implications for managerial practice.