Corporate Venturing Investment, Resource Reconfiguration and Competence-based Growth Strategy

Dynamic capability enables resource reconfiguration, which is important when the environment constantly changes in an unanticipated way. However, it may be difficult for current existing management to build new competence because of learning myopia, and external search of new competence provides an alternative way to achieve this end. From competence-based and organizational learning views, we offer a typology of corporate venturing investment that consists of competence replicating, competence leveraging, competence upgrading and competence building activities. This paper proposes that corporate venturing investment can be regarded as a strategic ways to achieve resource reconfiguration. Resource reconfiguration has synergistic and learning purposes. A synergistic type of resource reconfiguration involves competence replicating and leveraging, and a learning type contains competence upgrading and building activities. When the environment features high level of uncertainty, a learning type of resource reconfiguration is more than a synergistic type because the existing competence may be outdated. By integrating competence-based, transaction cost economics and real options theory, we further discuss the adequate governance structure for each type of corporate venturing investment. Managerial implications and further research directions based on the current work are also discussed