Narrow Results

This paper provides an overview of the venture capital industry and its development in Asia and Singapore. Venture capital plays an important role in innovation and economic growth. Indeed, the resurgence of the United States as a technology leader is intimately linked to the success of Silicon Valley. As Singapore enters the next phase of economic development, the creation of internal engines of growth is an urgent task. The Singapore government has done much to provide an environment for entrepreneurship to thrive. Its success at replicating the Silicon Valley culture will be important for Singapore's future economic success.

In the intermediate goods industry, largely made up of small and medium enterprises (SMEs), a government can use a matching fund to execute policies that, for example, provide funds to promote and support firms' innovative activities. This study performs an empirical analysis to investigate the additional effects when a government uses a matching fund in this way and, in particular, to analyze the growth of firms. Methodologically, to deal with the selectivity issue, we adopt a propensity score matching (PSM) estimator. We also investigate the performance of the matching fund according to changes in private shares. Our findings show that supported firms invested larger amounts in R&D and procured external financing through an overall improvement in their level of reliability. However, the results also show that this was not connected to further improvements in business performance. Moreover, although our results show some positive impact on assets and R&D expenditure from private investment in the matching fund, the relationship between sales and fixed assets was non-significant.

Venture capital (VC) is usually invested in high risk technology companies at their early stages of development. In response to the industry risk environment, the VC fund managers have developed a set of risk management practices appropriate for the industry which include investment syndication. Furthermore, the VC funds are supplied by individual and institutional investors with different risk profiles and investment focus, usually in finite amounts and for a limited period of time. The funding agreement between the VC firms and the fund investors combined with the limited amount and time can lead to additional funding liquidity risks as the VC funds are invested in the portfolio companies. In this paper, we develop a simple two period model from a VC firm’s perspective with funding liquidity constraints to demonstrate how funding liquidity risk can influence syndication decisions. We subsequently analyze the implication of the model, derive a set of predictions and validate them with VC investment data from Australia. The analysis shows that syndication has both instrumental function in risk management and behavioral implications on risk culture essential for addressing the emerging frontiers of sustainability risks.

Venture capital is an important force in promoting technological innovation and social progress. Research regarding the attention on venture capital can help understand the development and social influence of venture capital, which is conducive to the policy guidance and incentive to the industry. With the rapid development of information technology, the Internet has become the main source and dissemination channel of information, and search engines have become an important interface for information. Through a deep analysis of the search index of venture capital, we can find information that is more important. Based on the principle of time series visualization, we have transformed the time series data of attention on venture capital into complex networks and analyzed its network characteristics. We collected the Baidu index of Chinese venture capital from January 1, 2018 to November 25, 2019 and constructed a time series network based on PC plus mobile search, PC search, and mobile search. The results show that the convenience of the mobile terminal offers makes it the primary mode of tracking the industrial dynamics of venture capital, especially hot news. Relatively, PC terminal search is more stable than mobile search, more focused on industry reports, and refers to long-term followers of venture capital. Both degree distribution and centrality distribution of the three networks show that abnormal peaks and lows are few and the number of key time points in the time series of search on venture capital is insignificant. However, the clustering results show obvious segmentation effect that the peak effect of hot news is evident.

In this paper we analyze the development of venture capital in Thailand. We use institutional theory in order to better understand the context of developing venture capital investment and operations strategies in a developing country, which lacks fully-developed legal and financial institutions. The major challenges for venture capitalists are maintaining a viable presence and exiting their investments through alternatives other than an IPO.

Top 10 Most Common Intellectual Property Rights Mistakes During Venture Capital Due Diligence.

No abstract reveived.

The article is about the venture capital funding in Singapore's Biotech industry.

QUALIFLEX is a flexible method to solve the multi-criteria decision-making problem with a few alternatives. Moreover, the linguistic term is a very general way used by decision makers (DMs) to express their real perceptions. In particular, the probabilistic linguistic information, including the probability of each linguistic term, can simulate the vague perceptions of the DMs well. Therefore, the main contributions of this paper are constructing two novel QUALIFLEX with probabilistic linguistic information. First, based on the classical QUALIFLEX, it has been extended under probabilistic linguistic circumstance. Secondly, it is common for the DMs to have different risk attitudes for gains and losses when making their decisions under uncertainty, which is well explained by prospect theory (PT). Hence, PT has been integrated into the extended QUALIFLEX. Then, in this paper, a prospect QUALIFLEX is proposed as well. The feasibility and validity of the proposed methods have been verified by a numerical example in venture capital. The comparative and simulated analysis shows that the latter method with prospect framework is more appropriate than the former one because of the inherent psychological behaviors of the DMs and its excellent ability in identifying the similar alternatives. Furthermore, the ranking results derived from the prospect QUALIFLEX do not change with the different values of parameters. It reveals that the prospect QUALIFLEX is stable and reliable.

A management buyout market is now developing in Japan as corporations face unavoidable pressures to restructure. In this article we compare the development of the Japanese management buyout market with the earlier development of the UK and German markets. Based on our three annual surveys of the market we first present trends in market value and volume and vendor and sectoral source of deals. We discuss the factors facilitating the development of buyouts, which are categorized into those leading to the supply of deal opportunities; the demand for private equity; the infrastructure to complete deals; and the nature of mechanisms to realize investments. The final section considers the implications of our findings for the future development of the market as well as for foreign entrants.

The paper revisits the success case of Boston Route 128 in commercializing technology. The study applies the concept of industrial clusters to explain the development of technologically sophisticated region of Boston Route 128. Boston Route 128 has transformed its structure from the minicomputer and microprocessor-based technology industry in the 1980s to biotechnology industry in the late 1990s and 2000s. It is argued that the successful commercialization process of Boston Route 128 is rooted in innovation, entrepreneurial management and the policy towards technology commercialization. To consider the argument, the paper proposes the cluster model to explain the strengths of Boston Route 128 in biotech clusters. It represents a model of the universities working with industries to form a cluster of high technology based firms. The venture capital accelerates the process of technology commercialization, giving rise to a new Boston model of innovation management. Policy makers may use the Boston model as a benchmark to evaluate their performance in supporting Hi-Tech industries.

This paper discusses an emerging heterodoxy in the academic literature on entre- preneurial technology finance that is based on the idea of "bootstrapping." Bootstrap finance is a third approach (emphasizing funding technology ventures through revenue and other non-traditional sources), alongside the orthodoxies of traditional business finance (emphasizing debt) and contemporary venture finance (emphasizing venture capital and public equity). The paper also reports the results of an original empirical study of entrepreneurial technology firms in the bioscience-related industries in the United States. The data from the study show that "unorthodox" bootstrap financing is actually the dominant kind of financing in those high technology industries. The data are analyzed to explore industry effects, regional milieux effects, and entrepreneurial-status effects on the relative mix of bootstrap finance and the three traditional sources of finance: venture capital, public equity and debt finance. The effects on firm behavior and performance of variations in financing strategy are explored, with implications for managers of entrepreneurial technology ventures and educators concerned with technology entrepreneurship.

We studied the optimal funding of the public sector for the Hi-Tech industry in the presence of short-term, cyclical, venture capital (VC) funding by constructing a decision-making model that results in the optimal governmental support and a model that accounts for the dynamics of the VC industry. We found that the VC industry is highly correlated with the NASDAQ stock index and that the optimal public policy for funding the Hi-Tech sector should be anti-cyclical, dynamic, and conditioned on the VC investments. The models and their validation are discussed as well as the practical implications for policy and decision makers.

The United States, having enjoyed nearly half a century of technology leadership, today faces a number of challenges in maintaining its innovation advantage. These include: (1) Declining science and engineering talent pipeline, (2) increased global competition, (3) rigidity of the venture capital model, and (4) saturation of key technology centers. In a period where all Science Engineering (S&E) talent is not necessarily deployed to S&E occupations due to other opportunities or geographical challenges, "Dispersed Innovation," the idea of a location independent model to achieve higher technical utilization of American S&E talent is a proposed solution which consists of four key components: (1) Build out of advanced transportation networks, (2) increased use of collaboration tools, (3) cultural acceptance of entrepreneurship, and (4) increased funding options and models.

A growing body of literature has explored the motivation of firms to take part in open source software (OSS) development, yet the role of venture capitalists and their role in OSS projects is largely unattached. Based on information from publicly available data, we investigated the investment behavior of 37 VCs investing in 45 OSS projects. To understand how these venture capitalists try to reduce their perception of uncertainty and risk, we developed a 2 × 2 matrix of different investment approaches. While the X-axis represents the average age of a community/OSS product at the time of investment, the Y-axis reflects the average round of a venture capitalist's entry. This exploratory study illustrates how venture capitalists limit the level of risk inherent in certain OSS investments and results in a number of implications for communities seeking for external funds as well as for investing firms.

This paper reviews the creation and the development of biotechnology start-ups in Japan known as "bioventures". In the early 1990s, the Japanese government began to introduce new policies to promote the development of bioventures. Within the span of a decade, the number of bioventures grew five times. However, majority of them continued to operate at the seed or start-up stage. This paper seeks to explore the underdeveloped state of bioventures in Japan, based on the case study method which includes the use of interviews and reviews of several policies and regulations. This paper also compares the development of Japanese biotechnology industry with the biotechnology industry in the US and Europe. This paper concludes that the lack of a sustainable system of funding is the real issue hindering the development of bioventures in Japan.

This study discusses the role of core and symbolic capabilities during due-diligence processes when investing in companies in turbulent fields such as the biotechnology industry. The results indicate that investors' evaluations are hierarchical and are based on two premises. First, investors look for core capabilities — the characteristics that signal the potential for future success. They then search for symbolic elements, such as reputation, to confirm their decisions. The study expands earlier models of investors' evaluation processes. It also offers new insights for entrepreneurs of biotechnology firms.

High-technology innovation often takes place in small, independent startups; it can also take place in the research-and-development facilities of large, established corporations. A third possibility is that innovation will take place in a hybrid of these two ideal types, for example via corporate venture capital (CVC) or via distribution channel agreements. Using detailed data on a large number of high-technology firms located in the US, Western Europe and Israel, we test a set of predictions about innovation and firm boundaries that flow from previous empirical studies and formal models. Our central research questions relate to how the boundaries of the firm are affected by the level of competition in product markets, portfolio firm research intensity, national institutions, cash flow risk, innovation risk by rivals, and managerial resources. We find some evidence that hybrid organization is more likely (relative to stand-alone startup status) for more established firms (with more employees and larger revenues). Hybrid organization is also more likely when competition is declining, less likely when competition is static, and no more likely when competition is growing. In addition, our results are consistent with previous findings that CVC is associated with herding behavior as opposed to participation in the most innovative industry segments. Hybrid organization is associated with patent possession by the high-tech startup, but CVC partners are less concerned than other investors (VCs) that the patents provide useful barriers to entry. Results pertaining to cash flow risk, research intensity, management team, and innovation risk by rivals were neither consistent in terms of sign nor robust to various specifications.

The paper examines the long-run relationship between venture capital and innovation in the 19 European Economic Area (EEA) countries over the period 1989–2014. We use three different indicators of venture capital (VC), such as VC at early stage investment, VC at later stage investment, and VC total investment, and seven different indicators of innovation, such as patents-residents, patents-nonresidents, patents-total, research and development expenditure, researchers in research and development activities, high-technology exports, and scientific and technical journal articles, to examine this long-run relationship. Using cointegration technique, the study warrants the support of long-run relationship between venture capital and innovation in few cases, typically with reference to a particular VC indicator and innovation indicator. Expending the Granger causality test, the study finds the presence of both bidirectional and unidirectional causality between venture capital and innovation. However, these results vary from country-to-country within the EEA countries, depending upon the types of VC indicator and innovation indicator that we use in a particular empirical exploration process. The policy implication of this study is that the economic policies should recognize the differences in the venture capital and innovation in order to maintain the sustainable development in these EEA countries.

Venture capital (VC) is essential for the growth of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in developed e-commerce countries. SMEs play a crucial role in the economic development of both developing and developed countries. This paper proposes the influence of VC on the growth of e-commerce in SMEs using the propensity score matching (PSM) method. PSM is defined as the statistical analysis of observational data, where a statistical matching method attempts to evaluate the impacts of a treatment or policy. The experimental results show that the effect of e-commerce on SMEs who received VC financing experience improves the performance of employment growth and sales. Our findings reveal that VC significantly enhances employment rates and sales performance in e-commerce sectors. The study underscores the critical role of VC in driving innovation and growth within SMEs, providing valuable insights for investors and policymakers aiming to foster economic development.