A Rewarding Ride? How CVC Experience Influences New Venture’s Dominant Design Establishment

Abstract

New ventures often emerge based on disruptive technologies and enter dominance battles where one single technology among competing technological variants sponsored by different firms will become the dominant design (DD). The establishment of a technology as the DD is associated with enormous benefits to the sponsoring venture, but no study has explored factors that determine a new venture’s chance of success in establishing its technology as the DD. In this study, we examine the role of corporate venture capitalist (CVC) experience. We distinguished between CVC generic industry experience and CVC standard-setting experience, and found that CVC standard-setting experience has a larger impact (positive impact) than CVC generic industry experience (negative impact) in new ventures’ DD establishment. Further, we distinguished between two types of DD—DD based on end-user products and on intermediate technologies, and examined the moderating effect. Our study has important implications for the entrepreneurship literature, the DD literature, and the CVC literature.