Corporate venturing evaluation: How start-up performance is measured in corporate venturing during the collaboration phase

Abstract

In the context of business performance assessment, current research often focuses on evaluating effects of innovation projects with start-ups. Subsumed as corporate venturing (CV), investigating the impact of these projects is becoming increasingly important. Thus, the number of studies on the ex-post value of corporate venturing projects (CVP) has steadily increased over the last years. In contrast, this research attempts to cover the evaluation of CVP in the period between from the contract conclusion to termination. By conducting interviews, this research primarily aims at identifying indicators applied for evaluating CVP performance during the cooperation of subjects in the automotive industry. The results obtained show that evaluation is mostly based on subjective criteria and that no formal indicators are implemented to manage CVP during the collaboration phase. This research contributes to literature by revealing practically applied CVP performance indicators during the collaboration phase and by discussing their weaknesses.