Manuel Hess

Although Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) is widely believed to drive corporate innovation, its relevance is often questioned. This study uses problemistic search to investigate whether CVC activities consistent with a firm's core business are likely to have a positive impact on the positive relationship between business strategy and firm performance. We pay particular attention to prior negative past performance. Results confirm that CVC investments aligned with a company’s core business have a positive effect, even when past performance was negative. In difficult times, the marginal effect is weaker but still positive. As soon as the business recovers, CVC activities are expected to contribute to greater corporate competitiveness as CVC activities related to the core business are compatible with a recovered business strategy.

Corporate venturing (CV) has become a very important business tool for both corporations and start-ups and has received considerable research attention. However, existing studies are ambiguous and incomplete in terms of the optimal set-up, operation and termination of a CV program and the capture of value that is generated for the parent company. Based on the available research, we developed the Corporate Venturing Navigator (CVN) holding two artefacts: 1) the CVN Framework and 2) the CVN Cockpit. The results provide initial guidance on how to improve CV activities and realize their full potential with first application in practice. We highlight the contributions of the CVN in terms of theory and measurement.

Amazon is one of the largest online retailers worldwide. Amazon had an annual turnover of over $280 billion in 2019 but is very reluctant to publish figures and data on the distribution of sales across individual product categories. However, from the retailer’s point of view, these data would be particularly critical to determine the relevance of the sales channel and to understand the competition within specific product categories better. The objective of this study is to build a measure that illustrates Amazon’s market share and dominance in individual product categories to enhance market understanding and to enable retailers to make more informed decisions. By combining various high-quality data sources, we were able to create the Amazon Market Dominance Index (AMDI), which reflects Amazon’s market dominance compared to the entire German retail sector. The AMDI is calculated on a category-specific basis for Amazon’s ten main product categories. The semi-annual calculation of all AMDI values allows for growth-rate comparisons and the identification of seasonal effects. With the AMDI, we increase market transparency and provide data on Amazon’s market position that was previously unavailable. We help retailers with relevant and evidence-based insights that enable the identification of opportunities and risks in individual product categories.

The venture capital (VC) setting has long been questioned for its discrimination and tendency to promote men before women. Do those who go against the dominant behavior and take women on new venture boards face costs that could be avoided otherwise? To investigate this issue, we draw on social categorization theory and use a population of VC-financed new ventures. Our study confirms that adding women to new venture boards decreases new venture performance due to discrimination associated with women’s board engagement in board interlock networks. Moreover, while the ability to bridge structural holes in interlock networks has benefits, such as power and control over in-group resources, we argue and show that becoming too central in an interlock network has negative effects on performance due to redundancies and cognitive lock-ins. In extending our theory development to the interaction effect of these two negative effects, we propose there is hope for women who are active in the VC scene. We show that increasing gender diversity within focal boards helps overcome the downsides of high interlock network centrality. We discuss implications for board gender diversity, social categorization theory, and board interlock networks.

The bandwagon effect is an adoption diffusion process among networks that results from pressure exerted by prior adopters in the extant environment. The absence of a review within this context is surprising given the relevance of networks and information contained within networks for individual and organizational decision-making, particularly in an entrepreneurial context. An initial screening identified 561 articles addressing the topic of the bandwagon effect among organizational and behavioral scholars. This paper reviews the current literature to identify relevant research streams, to synthesize definitions and constructs, and to look into antecedents that trigger such effects as well as their outcome variables. Relevance and opportunities for future research directions are outlined and highlighted with a particular focus on new venture value creation.

We build on the activist choice homophily theory and challenge the traditional understanding that woman board members should try to break into the in-group of men to advance to influential positions in the male-dominated board networks of VC-funded new ventures. We hypothesize and evidence with our longitudinal data that women board members are better off advancing to influential positions when initially forming ties with their women sub-group. Our results also show that influential women in women sub-groups are more beneficial to new venture performance compared to men in men sub-groups. These findings evidence the benefits but also the boundary conditions of activist choice homophily.