Big Tech’s Impact on Innovation Trajectories: Dynamic Relation between Corporate Activities and Market Activities

We analyze the impact of corporate activities (such as CVC Investments and M&As) on market activities (such as new firm entry, exit and new financing) of entrepreneurial firms in the affected market segments. We focus on Big Tech’s corporate activities, where both corporations (e.g. acquirer) and target startups (e.g., acquiree) are "platforms". Employing the global-level Pitchbook dataset, we adopt the Age-Period-Cohort (APC) Analysis approach to build the affected groups, the Event Study approach to analyze the market activities, and two topic modelling algorithms (Latent Dirichlet Allocation and Author-Topic Model) to define the change of technology cluster over time. Unlike previous findings that focus on negative externalities (e,g., "kill zone"), we find a mixed externality effect for the affected startups that are similar to the target companies after the CVC and M&A event. Preliminary findings indicate a more complex relationship between Big Tech’s corporate activities and affected startups’ market activities: corporate activities might be a positive or negative information signal to the market depending on the underlying state of technological and market development. These findings suggest the need to assess the dynamic effect of corporate activities on shaping subsequent market activities, and thus innovation trajectories in a sector.