02/16/2022
By Roberto Santos

The Manning School of Business Department of Marketing, Entrepreneurship and Innovation invites you to attend a doctoral dissertation defense by Roberto S. Santos on “Three Essays on the Knowledge Production of International Venture Capital-Invested Ventures.”

Candidate Name: Roberto S. Santos
Defense Date: Friday, March 4, 2022
Time: 1 to 2:30 p.m.
Location: Virtual dissertation defense via Zoom.
Dissertation Title: Three Essays on the Knowledge Production of International Venture Capital-Invested Ventures

Advisor: Sunny Li Sun, Ph.D., Marketing, Entrepreneurship and Innovation Department, UMass Lowell

Committee Members:

  • Yi Yang, Ph.D., Marketing, Entrepreneurship and Innovation Department, UMass Lowell
  • Denise Dunlap, Ph.D., Marketing, Entrepreneurship and Innovation Department, UMass Lowell
  • Yong Li, Ph.D., Business Department, University of Nevada Las Vegas

Abstract:

International venture capital-invested ventures (IIVs) are new ventures that are financed by international venture capitalists (IVCs). Cross-border investments play an increasingly important role in financing innovation globally, but questions remain unanswered about IIVs. Across three empirical essays, I seek to answer three overarching research questions: (1) how do IVCs enhance IIV knowledge production, (2) how do IIVs generate new knowledge, and (3) how do IVCs enable IIV knowledge appropriation across different financing stages?

In the first essay, I advance a new framework that explains the unique relationship between IIVs and IVCs and how this affects IIV innovations based on three latent mechanisms: global mindset, social capital, and appropriability. Using a difference-in-differences design, the study reveals that following IVC investment, IIVs exhibit increased innovation productivity and innovation impact, which is driven by a shift towards more diverse and generative technologies. Further, the diffusion of IIV technologies is also enhanced as a result of IVCs cross-pollinating among their portfolio firms and across their investment syndicate.

In the second essay, I examine how IVCs, as catalysts, invigorate their portfolio firms to build new knowledge-generating routines and capabilities. Using a difference-in-differences approach, I find that following IVC investment, IIVs search more distant technological domains, broaden their search scope, and couple local search with distant search more frequently. These effects are moderated by the size of the IVC’s investment portfolio.

In the third essay, I advance a new process model of firm-level knowledge creation that elucidates how IVCs enable the development of IIV technological novelty and complementary technologies, and how this affects their ability to achieve an IPO. Using structural equation modeling, I find that IVCs are instrumental in enhancing the technological novelty of IIV knowledge stocks in the early stage and in the development of complementary technologies in the late stage, which leads to greater appropriability via an IPO.