Startup Accelerators, Information Asymmetry, and Corporate Venture Capital Investments
研究发现，创业加速器的进入能缓解信息不对称，促使企业风险投资增加对与母公司业务不相似的初创企业的投资，尤其对IT使用行业的企业帮助更大。
Beyond financial incentives, investments by Corporate Venture Capitalists (CVCs) are often motivated by strategic objectives, such as gaining early exposure to emerging technologies. However, in the presence of information asymmetry, CVCs tend to invest in startups with a high degree of business relatedness—startups that are less risky but lacking in knowledge novelty—which are not ideal for achieving their strategic objectives. With startup accelerators showing promise in mitigating the information asymmetry problem, we examine how a CVC’s investment pattern in a region shifts following a startup accelerator’s entry, with a particular interest in the degree of business relatedness between the CVC’s parent corporation and its portfolio companies. Analyses reveal that CVCs increase investments in startups that are dissimilar to their parent’s business following the entry of startup accelerators. We show that the two pathways through which accelerators reduce information asymmetry—quality signals, and mentorship and training—likely contribute to this change. In addition, the change is most pronounced for CVCs whose parent firm operates in an IT-using—rather than an IT-producing—industry, suggesting that accelerators help IT-using firms gain a foothold in the technology space through CVC investments. These findings deepen the understanding of the role that startup accelerators play in the entrepreneurial ecosystem against the backdrop of digital transformation occurring in nearly every industry. This paper was accepted by Kartik Hosanagar, information systems. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2020.03494 .