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As VC firms have an acute interest in high-tech companies, they potentially bear substantial risk of patent litigation. In this project, we aim at looking into the following questions: how do ex-ante and ex-post patent litigation risks affect VC firms’ investment strategies and how those risks is propagated among all portfolio companies they have invested?…Read More
We study information aggregation in organizational decision-making for the financing of entrepreneurial ventures. We introduce a formal model of voting where agents face costly tacit information to improve their decision quality.…Read More
In this project, we explore the impact of startup firms’ social media activities on their entrepreneurial financing performance. Social media can mitigate information problems in entrepreneurial financing in two ways.…Read More
The performance of venture capital (VC) investments load positively on shocks to aggregate return volatility. I document this novel source of risk at the asset-class, fund, and portfolio-company levels. The positive relation between VC performance and volatility is driven by the option-like structure of VC investments, especially by VCs’ contractual option to reinvest.…Read More
Crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter have been popular in the U.S. for several years, allowing everyday consumers to fund entrepreneurial ventures in return for the finished product. While such “reward-based” crowdfunding can open many doors for entrepreneurs, could it also close others?…Read More
Strategic alliances with established enterprises are known to be a valuable resource for entrepreneurial firms to obtain access to knowledge and resources which support their growth. In this paper we examine how the networks of the venture capitalists (VCs) that back them influence startups’ access to these alliances. …Read More
The gap between business research and industry practice can loom large at times, but bridging it is essential to ensuring that research is relevant to the outside world. For graduate students at the Wharton School, the Mack Innovation Doctoral Association intends to narrow that gap.…Read More
Venture capitalists often choose to form syndicates (groups of VCs) which jointly invest in projects instead of one VC funding the project individually. What are the determinants of who chooses to syndicate with whom?…Read More
Recent research by Senior Fellow Gary Dushnitsky measures the innovation success of new biotech ventures by tracking their patenting and publishing rates. He and coauthor Elisa Alvarez-Garrido find that the identity of the investor makes a big difference.…Read More
In recent years, crowdfunding has emerged as a viable new platform for raising funds for new products and ideas. In this project, we ask: How does this new form of entrepreneurial financing interact with the more traditional financing sources, such as venture capital and bank financing?…Read More
New research indicates that individuals’ investment decisions may outperform those of the group. How can firms make better decisions?…Read More
Biotech start-ups are a critical source of life-saving discoveries. What happens when VCs won’t fund them?…Read More
Entrepreneurial ventures are a key source of innovation. Nowadays, ventures are backed by a wide array of investors whose complementary asset profiles differ significantly. We therefore assert that entrepreneurial ventures can no longer be studied as a homogeneous group.…Read More
This study develops and tests a set of novel theoretical predictions about the conditions under which category spanning is rewarded by external audiences. To do this, we revisit the assumption that comprehensible organizational identities are associated with individual categories.…Read More
Policymakers see entrepreneurs as a crucial source of employment and productivity growth, yet our systematic knowledge of the steps that lead to the founding of a new entrepreneurial venture is limited. A key difficulty in studying entrepreneurship is that we do not observe the counterfactual—those who consider starting ventures but do not.…Read More
Biotech startups increasingly turn to corporate venture capital (VC) arms for funding, rather than to traditional venture capitalists. The innovation implications for these startups remain unexplored. Here, we present evidence that the shift in funding patterns is associated with a greater output of scientific publications as well as patenting.…Read More
Even though it is well understood that the success of entrepreneurial ventures depends to a great extent on their interorganizational relationships, the role of the external environment in which these relationships unfold remains relatively unexplored. In contrast, resource-dependence theory regards the environment as a major factor in the degree to which external resources contribute to firm performance.…Read More
There is empirical evidence that Venture capital (VC) firms foster innovation in the U.S. As a result, many foreign governments have provided incentives to VC investments in the hope that this will translate into venture innovation. Yet, we know less about the effect of VCs on innovation abroad.…Read More
This paper explores the phenomenon of “acqui-hires”, defined as acquisitions of early-stage startups made purely to acquire talent. Acqui-hires are prevalent among Northern California’s high-technology companies, who use these to fill gaps in their strategic roadmaps. Taking the perspective of an acquirer, we examine the different ways acquirers approach acquir-hires relative to conventional acquisitions.…Read More
Biotech startups increasingly turn to Corporate VC arms for capital, rather than financially-oriented VCs. The innovation implications for these startups remain unexplored. We present evidence that the shift in funding patterns is associated with greater academic publications as well as patenting output.…Read More
