Venture capital and government involvement from a qualitative systematic literature review perspective

The financing of young start-up companies is hindered by market failures that prompt governments around the world to intervene at the venture capital market. The aim of this paper is to give a comprehensive overview on this research field based on sound systematic literature review methodology, which was never done before. We found three major themes: pure governmental venture capital involvement, governmental-private venture capital cooperation, and governmental involvement in the financing of pre-seed startups. The evaluation of the governmental efforts varies according to these themes and also the investigated geographic location. Generally, pure governmental venture capital is the most controversial theme, the government-private cooperation is mostly viewed in a positive light, while the authors almost unanimously praise the government’s efforts when financing pre-seed startups. We found that the success of governmental venture capital should not be judged based on the realized return of its investments, since profit maximalization is not its goal. The governments try to alleviate market failures at the venture capital market and transition financed startup companies to private financing. Thus, we advise researchers to use the number of this type of successful transitions as the success criteria of governmental investments.

Dynamic Evolution of Venture Capital Network in Clean Energy Industries Based on STERGM

This paper provides a detailed description of venture capital (VC) investments in clean energy industries in China over the period 2006–2017 and explores the evolution of clean energy industry VC networks through network formation and network dissolution. Results from the separable temporal exponential-family random graph model (STERGM) show that the factors vary in their relative importance for clean energy industry VC network formation and dissolution. Specifically, governmental venture capital (GVC) and geographic proximity have strong impacts on the formation of networks but not on their dissolution. Reputation and structural embeddedness promote the formation of networks and inhibit their dissolution, and cognitive proximity is found to cause network formation while facilitating network dissolution. The results provide practical and theoretical guidance for the network development of VC firms investing in clean energy industries.

The Role of Governmental Venture Capital in the Venture Capital Ecosystem: An Organizational Ecology Perspective

We use the theory of organizational ecology to study how governmental venture capital (GVC) affects the investment behavior of private venture capital (PVC). Because of its objectives and dominant competencies, GVC is a unique organizational species that occupies a different niche than PVC. GVC is conceived to establish mutualistic relations with PVC. Accordingly, the greater the presence of GVC in a venture capital (VC) ecosystem, the more PVC investors should be attracted toward GVC’s niche. We consider several relevant niche dimensions at the company (age and size), industry (biotechnology), and regional (competitiveness) levels. Our analysis of 1,239 PVC investments in Europe confirms most of our predictions.