Tapping Into the Knowledge of Incumbents: The Role of Corporate Venture Capital Investments and Inventor Mobility

This article investigates the impact of corporate venture capital (CVC) investments and inventors' mobility on the extent to which new ventures use incumbents' knowledge resources as inputs for their innovation activities. Our findings suggest that ventures receiving CVC investments draw less on investors' knowledge, while inventor mobility increases the extent to which an incumbent's technological knowledge is used by recipient ventures. Ventures combining CVC investments and inventor mobility from the same incumbent are selected for drawing less on that incumbent's patents, but these citation flows increase in the period after investment and the inventors' hiring events are combined. Our results, thus, unveil the organizational complexity associated with the individual and combined roles of CVC investments and inventor mobility in determining new ventures' innovation behaviors.