This study investigates how sustainable entrepreneurship and innovation act as catalysts for the transition towards a green and blue economy by comparing 30 developed and developing countries. Using Principal Component Analysis (PCA), five strategic indicators are analyzed: Venture Capital investment (including deal-based global ranking), Global Innovation Index rank, Ocean Health Index, Corruption Perceptions Index, and Green Growth Index. Together, the first three principal components explain over 82% of the variance, revealing distinct structural patterns. Developed economies such as Sweden, Germany, and Denmark combine strong innovation performance, institutional quality, and environmental resilience, while emerging economies like Morocco, Kenya, and South Africa face governance and innovation gaps but demonstrate relative potential in green growth. The United States stands out as an outlier with exceptionally high venture capital availability, whereas Singapore shows solid innovation and governance accompanied by fragile ocean health, and Saudi Arabia exhibits persistent weaknesses in green growth. These findings provide actionable insights for multiple stakeholders: policymakers in developing countries should prioritize institutional reforms and targeted financing to unlock entrepreneurial ecosystems; investors can identify economies where innovation-driven ventures align with sustainability opportunities; and entrepreneurs can leverage green and blue market niches in contexts where environmental needs are urgent. By mapping country clusters and their structural trade-offs, this research offers a decision-making framework that helps governments, investors, and innovators design tailored strategies to accelerate sustainable growth and resilience in the global transition towards green and blue economies.

This article uses the medical technology startup Theranos as a case study to analyze the reasons for its failure and the management lessons learned from venture capital investments. The study found that Theranos' core technology was immature and lacked independent verification, leadership was highly centralized and fostered a culture of fear, the board lacked professional expertise, and investors were seriously deficient in pre-investment due diligence and post-investment oversight. Furthermore, the venture capital market suffers from a star founder effect and me-too investing, exacerbating investment risks. The company's management was in a state of high centralization of power. Founder Elizabeth Holmes held absolute decision-making authority, and a fear-based corporate culture characterized by suppressing doubts and concealing problems took root internally. This rendered the risk early warning mechanism completely ineffective. Moreover, most board members were figures from the political and business circles outside the medical technology field, lacking professional technical backgrounds, which made it difficult for them to effectively judge and supervise the risks of the core business. This article proposes risk management recommendations for high-tech startups, including strengthening technical feasibility assessments, increasing post-investment governance participation, establishing periodic review and exit mechanisms, and emphasizing the importance of building a corporate culture and improving oversight to prevent similar capital-technology imbalances from recurring.

This cross-sectional study investigates how US academic medical centers used their own venture capital funds to invest in early-stage health care companies from 2014 to 2024.

This article examines the rationale and emergent effects of state-led venture capital (SVC) investments as an urban developmental tool to pursue industrial upgrading. Building on the concept of urban state venturism, the article introduces a new framework to examine how state institutions in Hefei, the capital city of Anhui province in central China, became SVC investors in private firms with high growth potential. Juxtaposing published interviews by key state actors with 25 interviews with venture capital industry professionals and analysts, the Hefei case study highlights urban state venturism as a contextualized extension of Chinese state entrepreneurialism. This extension is characterized by a “high risk, high gain” approach to urban development in China that is increasingly prominent in the face of growth limitations in existing industrial pathways. The analysis complements emergent studies that accentuate the constitutive role of state entrepreneurialism in driving urban development and advances a large body of work on Chinese state actors’ use of market tools to achieve their respective political objectives.

The long-term impact of entrepreneurial financing on job creation based on the roles of venture capital and angel investment

A new battlefield for later-generation successors: The effects of transgenerational succession on corporate venture capital investments

Strategic coupling in global financial networks: divergent trajectories of domestic and foreign venture capital investments in the Yangtze River Delta, China

ABSTRACT Drawing on structural inertia theory, this study examines network inertia in venture capital (VC) collaborations within the hospitality and tourism industry. By distinguishing the tie-level and structural-level inertia, the research results show that VCs tend to maintain existing ties, prefer well-connected partners and form triadic closures, reinforcing network structure over time. Interestingly, lead VC firms are less likely to initiate new ties, suggesting strategic selectivity and tie saturation. These findings highlight how individual behaviors contribute to persistent, centralized, and cohesive network structures. By integrating network dynamics into structural inertia theory, this study enhances our understanding of collaborative persistence in the hospitality and tourism industry increasingly shaped by strategic partnerships and transformation. These findings imply a dual-level inertia pattern where dyadic-level selective behaviors foster centralized, cohesive networks over time. This study advances research on network and hospitality and tourism entrepreneurship and offers insights into VC investment in the sector.

Venture capital (VC) is vital for innovation and economic growth, providing capital and networks to early-stage firms. While research shows a generally positive impact, challenges and failures are often overlooked, potentially creating a skewed perception of success. A review of 72 articles reveals that VC investment is concentrated in developed nations and a few emerging economies, highlighting uneven growth and the need for government interventions to promote a more balanced landscape. The review emphasises the critical importance of examining contextual factors, such as institutional frameworks and technological infrastructure, in assessing the effectiveness of venture capital in various emerging economies. This systematic review offers several key contributions with practical implications for policymakers, private investors, and the business community. First, it provides evidence-based insights into the effectiveness of VC in fostering innovation and economic growth, informing the design of targeted policies to support SME development. Second, it offers a nuanced understanding of the factors that influence the success of VC-backed SMEs in emerging economies, enabling more informed investment decisions. Third, building upon existing research, this study asserts its contribution by providing valuable, practical guidance for entrepreneurs. It offers a deeper understanding of the VC landscape, outlining both its potential benefits and inherent challenges. This enables entrepreneurs to develop more informed strategies for engaging with VC funding and maximising its impact on their businesses. The study also acknowledges limitations related to database restrictions, language bias, and limitations in search terms, suggesting avenues for future research to contribute to shaping venture capital investments and overall economic growth.

Venture capital investment and hedge fund investment are two asset classes of alternative investment fund portfolios. The purpose of this study was to determine whether the digital currency named bitcoin truly adds to diversification in an alternative investment fund portfolio. Vector auto regression was used to determine any unidirectional or bidirectional relationship between variables. The DCC-GARCH test was conducted to determine any conditional correlations that impact volatility transmission over a shorter and longer duration of time between variables. The results showed that there was no unidirectional or bidirectional relationship between bitcoin and FTSE venture capital index, as well as between bitcoin and the Barclays Hedge Fund Index. The DCC model showed no volatility transmission between bitcoin and the Barclays Hedge Fund Index, whereas volatility persists between bitcoin and the FTSE Venture Capital Index, connecting risk between the financial time series with only low correlations. These findings suggest that bitcoin could be used by investors, policy makers, and hedgers for diversification in alternative investment fund portfolios.

ABSTRACT This paper examines venture capital (VC) syndication strategies employed to mitigate the risks of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in strong versus weak institutional conditions. This study utilizes a comprehensive dataset of 41,008 VC deals across 74 economies between 1 January 2018 and 30 June 2022. Using a multi-level mixed-method approach, we demonstrate that during the COVID-19 pandemic VCs avoided syndication as a risk-mitigation strategy in seed and early-stage VC investments particularly in regions with strong legal frameworks where syndications were more common pre-pandemic. However, the tendency of VC investors to avoid syndication under heightened risk was moderated by founder-CEO leadership; VCs selectively embraced syndication in founder-led firms. The novel contribution of this study is that while VC investors typically avoided syndications to mitigate agency risks in high-risk settings, during the pandemic they instead rallied around founder CEOs – viewed as risk buffers – in syndicated deals, a strategy previously observed in early-stage and emerging market investments. The study also reveals that VCs avoided investment in larger deals during the COVID-19 pandemic, consistent with efforts to mitigate risk.

Most start-ups fail, and early-stage ventures face even lower survival rates. Identifying high-potential start-ups remains a critical challenge for venture capital (VC) investors and policymakers. While predictive models exist, the evolving relationships between VC investors, start-ups, and management teams in dynamic networks are underexplored. We propose a method to predict whether a start-up will succeed within 5 years of its first funding round. Using a 40-year global VC dataset, we model the VC ecosystem as a dynamic bipartite network linking start-ups to individuals (investors/managers). Our approach incrementally updates graph embeddings through unsupervised self-attention to incorporate new nodes, edges, and their neighbors. Node embeddings are further fine-tuned via link prediction and classification tasks, while temporal dependencies are captured to form sequential representations. The model identifies early-stage start-ups with twice the success likelihood of those chosen by professional investors. Key factors including networking and education align with VC literature. Additionally, we provide model complexity analysis and open source our implementation to support practical applications and future research.

ABSTRACT Drawing on real options theory, this paper examines the impact of technological uncertainty (TU) on firms’ corporate venture capital (CVC) investment decisions. Using longitudinal data from China’s high-tech sector between 2012 and 2022, we employ a fixed effects model to test the relationship between TU and firms’ CVC investments. The results indicate that TU is positively associated with CVC investments. This positive effect is more pronounced for firms led by chief executive officers (CEOs) with financial expertise and less pronounced for firms with older CEOs. The heterogeneity analysis reveals that the positive relationship is more pronounced for larger firms, firms dominated by long-term institutional investors, and firms in less competitive industries. Economic consequence tests show that CVC investments increase firms’ innovation performance and value. These findings provide new insights into the antecedents of CVC investments in the context of emerging markets.

ABSTRACT The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has steered a multitude of investment activities, yet there is a scarcity of research on venture capital investments, which play a pivotal role in these financial endeavours. Based on China’s provincial panel data, we use the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a quasi-natural experiment to investigate its impact on regional venture capital investments. The results show that: (1) The BRI initiative can effectively promote venture capital investments in the regions along China’s routes. (2) The government’s innovation subsidy (GIS) and government-guided investment fund (GGIF) have played pushing and guiding roles respectively, in the growth of venture capital investments in the regions along the Belt and Road. Compared with the pushing effect of the GIS, the GGIF has a greater leverage effect in the positive impact of BRI on venture capital investments in regions along the Belt and Road. (3) Furthermore, in regions with higher degree of marketization and highly upgraded industrial structure, the BRI initiative can significantly promote the increase of venture capital.

Spatial proximity in venture capital investments and assets intangibility

Exploring China's venture capital investment dynamics and influencing factors: a perspective of intercity flow

The performance of government-backed venture capital investments

A Study on the Impact of Venture Capital Investment on Startup Performance in Daegu: Focusing on Growth and Innovation

Venture capital was initially introduced in Indonesia as an alternative financing instrument oriented towards empowering small, medium, and startup businesses with growth potential. Through capital participation mechanisms, venture capital not only provides funds but also managerial support and access to business networks. Capital participation, which was initially driven by the spirit of economic equality, now tends to focus on profitability, valuation, and exit strategies. This shift has given rise to a phenomenon that can be termed "loss of soul," namely the fading of the social function and the goal of developing a people's economy, which is the philosophical background for the birth of venture capital. This article aims to legally examine the capital participation model in venture capital in Indonesia and analyze the shift in legal orientation that underlies it. This research uses normative legal research methods with statutory, conceptual, and comparative approaches. The analysis is carried out to assess the suitability between the prevailing legal norms and the ideals of economic empowerment that should be upheld. The results of the study show that venture capital regulations emphasize more on legal certainty for investors than protection for SMEs, resulting in an imbalance of interests. Therefore, legal reform and strengthening the role of the OJK are needed to ensure that the venture capital participation model retains the "soul" of empowerment, in line with the principle of social justice in national economic development

Abstract Integrating the attention‐based view with the strategic leadership interfaces perspective, we propose a theoretical model of situational urgency mechanisms influencing the allocation of CEOs' attention towards responsive actions. Specifically, we theorize upon the role of humility, which leads CEOs towards embracing interfaces and makes them particularly attentive to the situational context in which they operate. We test our theorization by studying corporate venture capital investments in digital ventures as a response to the situational urgency for digital transformation originating from multiple levels of analysis, internal and external to the firm. Testing a sample of 362 CEOs from 191 firms and 35 industries, we find support for the importance of CEO humility and the moderating role of the lack of top management team digital experience (team‐level urgency) and emerging digital competition (industry‐level urgency). Our study provides important insights into CEO responsiveness and advances our understanding of situated attention through the theorization of situational urgency and its integration with the strategic leadership interfaces perspective.