Week 8 – Kim et al. 2016 – Joe

Keongtae Kim, Anandasivam Gopal, Gerard Hoberg (2016) Does Product Market Competition Drive CVC Investment? Evidence from the U.S. IT Industry. Information Systems Research 27(2):259-281.
Companies need ideas to keep competency advantage on innovation. Besides the traditional internal R&D investment to gain innovative knowledge, Firms have several avenues available to access such investment from outside thereby complementing traditional R&D. Corporate venture capital (CVC) is one of the outside resources, classified as open innovation. Whether to use CVC to gain innovative knowledge is heterogeneous among companies in different industries. The importance of knowledge and learning is likely to be most relevant in technology-intensive industries where persistent innovation is a key determinant of success. For companies in technology-intensive industries, such as IT industry, a critical factor that might also have a strong incremental influence on the observed intensity of CVC spending is product market competition. This study explores the relationship between product market competition and IT companies CVC investment by answering the following two questions: 1) Does product market competition faced by IT-producing firms lead to higher investments in CVC spending, all else equal? 2)Do CVC investments lead to higher innovation output? If so, is the relationship moderated by the technology leadership of the investing firm?

The authors proposed to measure product market competition using metrics derived from 10-K textual similarity. Clearly, just using OLS to regress CVC spending on product market competition with covariates or fixed effects cannot uncover the causality. The baseline model suffers from omitted variable bias and reverse causality concern. The authors then tried to use GMM for the dynamic panel data to relief the concerns. The results are consistent with the hypothesis even with several robustness checks using other instruments and panel data Heckman analysis, etc. The paper may still suffer sample selection bias due to the sample filtration. The observations remained in the sample are companies are industry leaders and operate at least 10 years from 1997 to 2007, during when the IT industry leaders turned over significantly, the CVC was hot and somewhat abused, and the market competence was becoming more fierce.

This work contributes to the IS literature by 1) examine product market competition, a systemic feature of the IT industry, as one such driver of this shift from internal to external innovation spending; 2) broadening the focus of IS research on competition to include its effects on the use of external innovation; 3) showing that R&D plays a more important contingent role in IT firms than previously acknowledged.