Why corporates syndicate their investments with a specific partner? An explorative analysis of corporate venture capital co-investments

The 80% of corporates that engage in CVC activities, make these investments with othercorporates, recognizing the strategic benefits provided by co-investors. Despite the relevanceof this phenomenon, no studies focus on the motivations that drive a corporate to syndicate itsinvestments and most important there are no researches that investigate antecedents that drivea corporate in choosing the partner with whom to syndicate the CVC investments. Thus, theaim of this paper is to study why corporates syndicate their CVC investment with a specificpartner. Based on the CVC and the alliance literatures we propose a research framework thatconsiders two main elements characterizing a CVC syndication, the backed start-up (where tosearch) and the co-investor (with whom to search). By using data gathered from theVentureXpert database, we conduct an exploratory analysis of the CVC syndication activitiesof 62 corporates that engaged in CVC syndication in a twenty-year time window. We foundthat, when syndicating their CVC investments, corporates are driven by the innovationcapacity of the industry in which they operate; by complementary resources of the partnerwhich whom they co-invest; and by the regime of intellectual property protection of theindustry in which they run business.