Exploring the effects of corporate venturing on new business creation

One of the main problems of large firms is that they tend to lose their entrepreneurial orientation (EO) once they have grown.The launch of corporate ventures (CV) has been adopted by managers, and studied by scholars, as the means to create new businesses within large companies with a low level of EO. Extensive research on CV has been carried out to understand how these projects can effectively lead to new business creation. However, there are no studies on the effect of CV projects on new business creation after the project has ended. More specifically, scholars have overlooked the prospect that a CV project may continue to influence new business creation and how this is possible. This article explores how CV projects have an effect on new business creation after they end, if any.The discussion builds on the analysis of the case study of Riso Gallo, an Italian company operating in the rice industry, which developed a CV project between 1988 and 1996 to sidestep a poor EO.