Bilateral inter‐organizational learning in corporate venture capital activity

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to investigate impacts of governance characteristics and bilateral inter‐organizational learning on performance in the context of corporate venture capital (CVC) activity. Design/methodology/approach - Based on a dataset of 232 CVC investments, the author examined how characteristics such as autonomy, incentive scheme, and broad representation of a CVC program and the knowledge inflows and outflows of the corporate investors impacted the corporate investor's innovativeness and the portfolio company's performance. Findings - The results show that knowledge outflows from corporate investors can help enhance their portfolio companies' performance. In addition, incentive scheme and autonomy may facilitate knowledge inflows from portfolio companies to corporate investors, and influence the performance of both corporate investors and portfolio companies. Originality/value - The paper's findings contribute to the inter‐organizational learning literature by empirically analysing the mutual learning processes in the context of corporate venturing. The paper extends corporate venturing literature by linking governance characteristic to the underlying mechanism of inter‐organizational learning between the corporate investors and the portfolio companies, as well as their performance.