Better disagree? Corporate Venture Evolution and Motives among Parent Firm and Corporate Ventures

The strategies of internal corporate ventures generally evolve as these new businesses explore their business environments. Parent firms and venture’s motives guide corporate venture strategic evolution. Deviating from common belief on the merits of consensus, our research uses a dialectical process theory lens on strategic change and hypothesizes that venture founding motive divergence influences corporate venture strategic evolution. Our empirical findings on dyadic data from parent firms and from their corporate internal ventures reveal contextualized effects about how venture founding motive divergence is associated with the degree to which ventures strategically evolve. We reveal that the advantages of motive divergence depend on dynamism of the environment into which the venture is launched as well as the venture’s level of operations autonomy.