The participation of new technology-based firms in EU-funded R&D partnerships: The role of venture capital

This paper investigates the participation of new technology-based firms (NTBFs) in EU-funded R&D partnerships. We examine whether venture capital (VC)-backed firms are more likely to enter these partnerships than their non VC-backed peers and the role of the ownership and governance of the VC investor. We resort to a mixed method approach. We use qualitative information collected through interviews with managers of NTBFs and VC firms to better illustrate our deductively derived theoretical hypotheses, that are then tested through a large scale econometric analysis. The econometric analysis takes advantage of the VICO dataset, which includes longitudinal data on 8346 NTBFs from seven European countries observed from 1995 to 2008, out of which 758 were VC-backed. The econometric results show that VC backing has a strong positive impact on NTBFs’ participation in EU-funded R&D partnerships, but the magnitude of this effect rapidly decreases with NTBFs’ prior experience of this type of partnership. Moreover, the magnitude of the impact of VC backing considerably differs depending on the type of investor with bank and government VC exhibiting the strongest positive effects.