| Abstract: |
Entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial activities influence the development and
well-being of both economies and societies to a large extent. At the heart of
all entrepre-neurial activities are new ventures - vehicles which
entrepreneurs use in order to ex-ploit opportunities through the
commercialization of newly developed products or services. In addition to the
many obstacles entrepreneurs face when creating a new venture and entering new
markets, the financing of these entrepreneurial initiatives becomes a large
obstacle. In particular, uncertainties regarding market acceptance of the
identified opportunity and thus survival and ultimately growth limit the
financing options of new ventures notably. Further, the financing decisions
made at the begin-ning of the entrepreneurial process have a lasting impact on
the development of the new venture once a certain type of financing is
acquired. Hence, securing the necessary financing is not only a major
challenge for the entrepreneur at the beginning of the entrepreneurial career.
The selection of the right amount of financing from the right source also
influences the development of the new venture over and beyond the early days
of existence. In line with this argumentation and while acknowledging the
limited number of fi-nancing options available to new ventures, venture
capital is often identified as a via-ble option for firms during in their
early stages of development. This form of financing is characterized to be
provided by institutional investors that jointly invest financial means,
experience, and networks into the firms they consider to be able to generate
the desired growth in return. Given the large array of new ventures however,
only a few are considered a potential investment, and thereof only a fraction
receives the necessary funding. Regarding the latter group of investees
however, a venture capital investment has empirically proven to positively
influence new venture survival and growth, translating into increased
performance of venture capital-backed over non-venture capital-backed firms.
Given the fact that venture capital itself is a fascinating field of research
but likewise of great importance for the financing of new ventures at the same
time, this dissertation develops new empirical insights about the role of
ven-ture capital in the context of new ventures that were created in an
academic context. Further, crowdfunding as a new means of entrepreneurial
finance is analyzed against the background of its signaling value in the
investment decision of venture capitalists. The first empirical contribution
uses a proprietary dataset of 98 German research-based spin-offs founded
between 1997 and 2012 and assesses which firm-specific and system-inherent
factors are decisive for the spin-offs’ growth while drawing on the
re-source-based view of the firm as theoretical framework. Specifically, this
dissertation aims to evaluate whether venture capital-backed research-based
spin-offs outperform non venture capital-backed research-based spin-offs and
whether a performance differ-ence is explained by venture capitalists’
scouting or coaching capabilities. The empiri-cal findings suggest that a
homogeneous educational background of the academic en-trepreneurs is
positively associated with the research-based spin-off’s growth. Similar-ly, a
training provided by the parent research organization intended to develop
entre-preneurial skills and to establish a network to outside professionals as
well as the commercialization of a novel technology have a positive impact on
a research-based spin-off’s growth. Concerning the involvement of venture
capitalists, venture capital-backed research-based spin-offs show a superior
employment and revenue growth compared to non-venture capital-backed
research-based spin-offs. As a possible cause for this superior performance,
the empirical findings support the view that this growth difference can be
attributed to venture capitalists’ coaching rather than their scouting
capabilities. The second empirical contribution addresses the increasing
popularity of crowdfund-ing as a new means to finance new ventures. In
particular, this dissertation assesses whether and how crowdfunding
campaign-specific signals that affect campaign success influence venture
capitalists’ selection decisions in new ventures’ follow-up funding rounds. By
doing so, this empirical contribution relies on cross-referencing a
proprie-tary dataset of 66,000 crowdfunding campaigns that ran on Kickstarter
between 2009 and 2016 with 100,000 investments in the same period from the
Crunchbase dataset. Using this approach, 267 new ventures with at least one
crowdfunding campaign could be identified. While drawing on signaling theory
and the venture capital and micro-finance literature, the empirical findings
reveal that a successful crowdfunding cam-paign leads to a higher likelihood
to receive follow-up venture capital financing, and that an inverted U-shaped
relationship exists between the funding received compared to the funding
desired and the probability to receive venture capital funding. Further, the
analyses provide statistical evidence that a special endorsement of campaigns
by the crowdfunding platform provider as well as social media presence in the
form of word-of-mouth volume has a likewise positive impact on the receipt of
follow-up ven-ture capital. Interpreting these findings, this dissertation
concludes that the results sup-port the view that venture capitalists
apparently rely on the decision of the crowd in order to evaluate the
potential of the entrepreneurial initiative when selecting new investment
opportunities. Over and beyond the signals that a crowdfunding campaign
produces and that are ap-parently factored into the investment decision of
venture capitalists, this dissertation also elaborates on how the presence of
a crowdfunding campaign itself, disregarding all its campaign-relevant
aspects, influences the investment decision of venture capital-ists in terms
of their decision to form syndicates. For the purpose of this research
ques-tion, this dissertation relies again on signaling theory and builds on
the syndication literature. The overarching empirical finding is that
crowdfunding seems to influence the syndication behavior of venture
capitalists. For one thing, the presence of a crowd-funding campaign
negatively influences both the likelihood of a syndicated investment as well
as the number of syndicate partners. For another, the findings reveal that
crowdfunding positively influences the formation of international syndicates.
Hence, the results support the assumption that the importance of crowdfunding
is also fac-tored into the investment decision of venture capitalists in terms
of their decision to syndicate. This dissertation concludes with the major
contributions for both theory and practice. In essence, the results derived
provide novel insights about growth factors of research-based spin-offs by
widening the focus of analysis. This is done by incorporating venture capital
into the research scope so as to advance the resource-based view of the firm.
Also, this dissertation shows that crowdfunding serves as a catalyst reducing
the per-ceived risk in the form of information asymmetries related to new
ventures. Thus, this dissertation advances signaling theory and also provides
important implications for the microfinance and VC literature. |