Early Phases of Corporate Venturing

This work is submitted to the Doctoral School on Knowledge and Management at the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy of the Copenhagen Business School in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD. The aim of this thesis is to present a combination of new theoretical perspectives and management guidelines that will enable better insight into the dynamics of the early phase of corporate venturing. This will include new perspectives on corporate venturing as it contributes to academia and practical tools for decision-making. The thesis provides two overall contributions to current corporate venture literature. First, it sheds light on the critical but overlooked dimensions of the early phases of the venture process. This includes prerequisites for the development of new innovative venture opportunities (i.e. venture ase), discovery of investment opportunities, and finally preparation for the evaluation of investment opportunities. The venture bases are those characteristics and prerequisites of a firm and its environment that can serve as resources for starting new ventures. Due to the innovative nature of the ventures, discovering the entrepreneurial opportunities becomes a key challenge involving a diversified set of actors. The early phases also include specific knowledge-creating actions to repare for evaluation of the many different investment opportunities. Secondly, the thesis contributes new perspectives on how the early phase activities are interlinked in the value chain. Contrary to previous literature, which sees the venture process as linear and foreseeable, this work illustrates that a more dynamic approach is called for, one that pays particular attention to how knowledge and learning guides activities in the venture process from developing new innovative ideas to evaluation of their significance.