Research On The Relationship Between Multiple-layer Network And Performance Of Chinese Corporate Venture Capital

Corporate Venture Capital(CVC)is one of the important inputs of technology finance and an important intermediary connecting industrial capital and technological innovation.Its greatest significance lies in the stimulation of innovation.With the rapid development of China's economy and the increasingly perfection of the capital market,more and more companies use CVC as an important way of external R&D,maintaining and expanding competitive advantages,and achieving financial and strategic benefits.CVC has specific advantages for both company investors and startups.For incumbent companies,CVC is an important channel for inter-organizational learning and access to external innovation resources.It provides incumbents with opportunities and channels to get in touch with new technologies and new markets,and nourish the innovation and achieve sustainable development of incumbents.And in terms of investment activities,incumbents can also obtain direct financial investment income.For start-ups,CVC's unique industry background and market resources provide start-ups with technical guidance,resource sharing and reputation endorsements,which are conducive to the innovation and rapid development of start-ups.Both incumbents and startups are market entities with non-financial main business.Under the current economic environment,CVC's innovation stimulation of both incumbents and startups is conducive to the transformation and upgrading of China's traditional industries and the implementation of the national innovation-driven development strategy.CVC is an important part of building an innovative country.CVC investment involves multi-party cooperation actors,including incumbent companies,CVC institutions,startups,cooperative investment institutions,accounting firms,law firms and other investment service providers,securities firms and banks and other listing service providers,and so on.It is diverse of the relationship between the actors.From social network perspective,it is a typical complex network structure.The resources and information among CVC actors flow in the network,and the actor'behaviors influence each other to change the network structure.The change of whole network structure also has an impact on its actors' behavior and decision-making.The dynamic evolution of CVC network reflects the process and trend of industry development.In the context,this study takes Chinese CVC as the research object,focuses on the characteristics and evolution of Chinese CVC multiple-layer networks.Based on literature review,CVC multi-layer networks are separated by different “relationship”and analyzed by structure of “Incumbents-CVC-Cooperator-Startups”.It studies the network characteristics and dynamic network evolution,and analyzes the influence mechanism of CVC network characteristics on investment performance.The main content and innovations of this paper are as follows:(1)Based on the multiple structure of "Incumbents-CVC-Cooperator-Startups",this study introduces social network analysis,divides CVC multiple-layer networks into strategic investment network and syndicated investment network,and studies the influence mechanism of network characteristics on CVC financial performance and strategic performance.The research on strategic investment network is based on the ternary structure of "Incumbents-CVC-Startups".This paper analyzes the incumbent companies constructing their strategic investment network through CVC,revealing the influence of incumbent companies' strategic objectives on the choice of CVC investment strategies,and the influence mechanism of investment network diversification on investment financial performance.Based on the resource-based view,it is found that the resource endowment of incumbents has a significant impact on the financial performance improvement of the CVC strategic investment network.Incumbent companies with strong financial strength and rich industry resources construct a CVC diversity strategic investment network,which can own higher investment financial performance.The research of the syndicated investment network is based on the ternary structure of "Incumbents-CVC-Cooperator",and analyzes the establishment of cooperative alliance network between incumbents and other investment institutions through syndicated investment,that convenient for information sharing and risk sharing.Based on the inter-organizational learning theory,this paper analyzes the CVC interorganizational learning network,systematically investigates the mechanism of interorganizational learning in CVC multiple-layer networks,and studies the influence mechanism of CVC network capabilities on its strategic performance.The study puts forward that incumbents should pay attention to the construction and maintenance of the external social network of the company,and create a healthy social network environment for the company to maintain its competitive advantage and achieve sustainable development.(2)This paper introduces a dynamic network research perspective in CVC study,builds a CVC dynamic network based on moving time windows,uses the Cosine Similarity Method to compare and analyze the overall structure of the network,and quantitatively divides the development stages of the CVC industry,which provides a new ideas and references for the research of industry development stage and life cycle.It laid a theoretical foundation for further detailed research on CVC.According to the development stage of CVC,it is possible to explain in detail the differences of CVC investment strategy selection and investment performance at different stages,and to compare and analyze the differences of CVC institutions at different stages and so on.The paper also uses the K-means clustering algorithm to quantitatively divide the "role" of the CVCs in network.According to the network characteristics,CVCs are divided according to the degree of proximity,so as to facilitate the research on CVCs.Traditional typology methods are mostly based on qualitative analysis.The network characteristics are the visual expression of CVC's previous investment experience and behaviors,and can be quantitatively and accurately analyzed.It is more scientific and intuitive to use network method to distinguish types.The division of the "role" of CVCs in network makes it structured,systematized,and typed to study on the complex CVC investment behaviors,creating conditions for studying CVC's innovation mechanism and investment performance mechanism,and facilitates the discovery of the internal relationships between various factors,and provides a favorable way to explain CVC's investment performance mechanism.(3)Based on multiple-layer social networks of CVC including the “whole network-subgroup network-ego network”,this paper constructs a multi-dimensional influence evaluation model with time weight for time series data.The model not only show the static multi-dimensional influence of CVCs in each time window,but also reflects the trend and continuity of influence in moving time windows,and dynamically measure the comprehensive influence of CVCs.The method combines the multiplelayer social networks with the comprehensive evaluation model of influence,which provides a new research perspective for the study of dynamic evaluation method,and can be used for reference of study on objects with characteristics of network and time continuity.This paper induces a new research perspective and provides a theoretical and municipal basis on how to improve the investment performance of corporate venture capital in China and promote the innovation performance of incumbent enterprises and entrepreneurial enterprises.The results provide a reference for the government supervision on industry development and enterprises on investment decisions.