Performance Management of Corporate Venturing Activities in Manufacturing Companies: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

Recent trends in manufacturing industries such as digitalization and sustainability have underlined the need for companies to significantly change their products and processes. This emphasizes the need for the capability to make use of radical innovations (radical innovation). However, many incumbent companies struggle to reliably create radical innovation since their research and development (R&D) is usually optimized to exploit competencies via incremental innovations. Thus, their innovation processes and setups fit the predictable and structurable needs of incremental innovation. In contrast, radical innovation are less predictable and, thus, require more agile and reactive processes. To benefit from startup-like structures, manufacturing companies started to increasingly use corporate venturing (CV) activities in the early 2010s. However, the performance of established forms of CV differs drastically. Also, there are still no definite findings on how to set up and use a performance management system to reliably increase CV performance. Therefore, this paper aims to explore the insights of practitioners on which problems and challenges occur in the innovation process of CV units and how they could be solved using performance management systems. To achieve this, the research includes an interview study with 17 different companies of the manufacturing sector in German-speaking countries which run a CV unit.