As an emerging form of strategic investment, Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) and its consequences on venture enterprises’ technology exploration have received more and more attention from scholars, especially in the context of open innovation that highlights interorganizational collaborative and external knowledge acquisition. To solve the inconsistency of existing research conclusions on the relationship between CVC and enterprise innovation, this research tries to explore the differential impacts of technological proximity on dual technological exploration of the venture enterprise from the knowledge-based view and the local-distant knowledge search theory. Based on multi-source matching data, including CVC records, patent, and financial information from 2010 to 2020 of 42 companies that are quoted on the Science and Technology Innovation Board, this paper conducts the Bayes Negative Binomial regression model for empirical analysis. The results show that technology proximity of CVC parties has an inverted U-shaped effect on local technological exploration of the venture enterprise. Both the density and degree centralization of inventor cooperative network of the venture enterprise positively moderate the main effect. Meanwhile, technology proximity of CVC parties has a positive effect on distant technological exploration of the venture enterprise. Both the density and degree centralization of inventor cooperative network of the venture enterprise negatively moderate the main effect. This study enriches the research perspective of CVC from the investor side to the venture enterprise side, clarifies the boundary conditions of the impact of technological proximity, and provides important theoretical guidance and practical reference for venture enterprises to select CVC partners and optimize internal inventor network structure.
Zhu et al. (Thu,) studied this question.