Corporate Venture Capital: How established firms use external resources to create new competencies

This Doctoral Dissertation is triggered by an emergent trend: firms are increasingly referring to investments in corporate venture capital (CVC) as means to create new competencies and foster the search for competitive advantage through the use of external resources. CVC is generally defined as the practice by non-financial firms of placing equity investments in entrepreneurial companies. Thus, CVC can be interpreted (i) as a key component of corporate entrepreneurship - acts of organizational creation, renewal, or innovation that occur within or outside an existing organization– and (ii) as a particular form of venture capital (VC) investment where the investor is not a traditional and financial institution, but an established corporation. My Dissertation, thus, simultaneously refers to two streams of research: corporate strategy and venture capital. In particular, I directed my attention to three topics of particular relevance for better understanding the role of CVC. In the first study, I moved from the consideration that competitive environments with rapid technological changes increasingly force established corporations to access knowledge from external sources. Firms, thus, extensively engage in external business development activities through different forms of collaboration with partners. While the underlying process common to these mechanisms is one of knowledge access, they are substantially different. The aim of the first study is to figure out how corporations choose among CVC, alliance, joint venture and acquisition. I addressed this issue adopting a multi-theoretical framework where the resource-based view and real options theory are integrated. While the first study mainly looked into the use of external resources for corporate growth, in the second work, I combined an internal and an external perspective to figure out the relationship between CVC investments (exploiting external resources) and a more traditional strategy to create competitive advantage, that is, corporate diversification (based on internal resources). Adopting an explorative lens, I investigated how these different modes to renew corporate current capabilities interact to each other. More precisely, is CVC complementary or substitute to corporate diversification? Finally, the third study focused on the more general field of VC to investigate (i) how VC firms evaluate the patent portfolios of their potential investee companies and (ii) whether the ability to evaluate technology and intellectual property varies depending on the type of investors, in particular for what concern the distinction between specialized versus generalist VCs and independent versus corporate VCs. This topic is motivated by two observations. First, it is not clear yet which determinants of patent value are primarily considered by VCs in their investment decisions. Second, VCs are not all alike in terms of technological experiences and these differences need to be taken into account.

I doveri e le responsabilità contabili nella corporate governance delle società di capitali

La costruzione di un modello efficiente di corporate governance deve offrire una disciplina adeguata dei doveri contabili. Ciò nonostante, gli ordinamenti giuridici configurano i doveri di contabilità in modo incompleto, giacché l’inadempimento di questi non comporta una sanzione diretta per il soggetto inadempiente. Come informazione sulla situazione economica e finanziaria della società, esiste un interesse pubblico nella contabilità, e questa può servire come base di giudizio a soggetti interni ed esterni all’impresa, nell’adozione delle sue scelte. Disporre di un’informazione falsa o inesatta al riguardo può comportare un danno ingiustificato alla società stessa, ai soci o ai terzi, che potranno esercitare le azioni precise per il risarcimento del danno cagionato. Per evitare la produzione di questi danni, da una prospettiva preventiva, la corporate governance delle società di capitali può prevedere dei meccanismi di controllo che riducano il rischio di offrire un’informazione sbagliata. Questi controlli potranno essere esercitati da soggetti interni o esterni (revisori legali) alla struttura della società, ed avranno una configurazione diversa a seconda che le società adottino una struttura monistica o dualistica di governance. Questo ci colloca di fronte ad una eventuale situazione di concorrenza delle colpe, giacché i diversi soggetti che intervengono nel processo d’elaborazione dell’informazione contabile versano la sua attuazione sullo stesso documento: il bilancio. Risulta dunque cruciale determinare il contributo effettivo di ciascuno per analizzare il suo grado di responsabilità nella produzione del danno.

The Road to Poverty Reduction: Corporate Governance and Female Participation in MFIs

1.Microfinance Industry – Context of Analysis. This paper is an introduction to the microfinance industry. It serves as a context of analysis, for the empirical settings and basis for building the theoretical argument for the thesis. 2.Women in Microfinance Institutions: The Road to Poverty Reduction and Gender Equality? One of the unique aspects of microfinance institutions is their focus on outreach, i.e. their ability to reach the poor. This paper explores whether the presence of women in microfinance institutions is associated with improved outreach. Building on prior research that shows that women tend to improve financial performance and social responsibility, we examine an original dataset of 226 microfinance institutions. The empirical results suggest that the presence of a female CEO, female managers and female loan officers is directly related to improved outreach, while the presence of women board members is not. 3. Women in Microfinance Institutions: Is There a Trade-Off Between Outreach and Sustainability? Abstract This paper’s contribution to the understanding of microfinance is two-fold. First, while it has been shown that female CEOs in MFIs increase financial performance, it will be argued that female managers, female loan officers and female board members will do the same. Secondly, having previously shown that having a female presence in management in MFIs improves social performance the outreach, it will be argued that having females in the MFIs’ management will not lead to a trade-off between outreach and sustainability. These findings are based on an original data set of 226 MFIs. Statistical analysis demonstrates that a weak relationship between female managers and female loan officers vis-à-vis financial performance, but female board members do not. The trade-off between outreach and sustainability can be avoided with the appointment of females to the MFIs’ management positions, but the same cannot be concluded for female board members.