How content-based programs directed to startups can enhance Corporate Venture Capital activities, building up awareness and trust: an example from Google.

Despite the effort dedicated to the construction of the survey and the collection of data, the analysis conducted presents limitations that have to be pointed out in order to be addressed in a future extension of the research to cover a more generalized industry-wide topic. First of all, as described in the methodology paragraphs, by not collecting data about the participants (except from their belonging to the category of entrepreneurs or aspiring ones and their participation to Google’s content-based programs), it is not possible to describe the sample carefully and to affirm it is representative of a diverse and globally-distributed business-oriented population.

Moreover, even with an audience of over 5000 virtual subjects (collective number of views of the post containing the survey on Linkedin groups and on other platforms), the survey was able to collect only 82 valid answers (after cleaning them from the bots), therefore generating a quite small sample size that should be extended in a future analysis to confirm the findings.

When it comes to the recommendations for further research, a first general input, coming from the experience of collecting data through surveys, is to investigate ways to make the collection more reliable and protected from undesired effects of economic incentives that may be offered: in this thesis, the activity of automated software (also known as “bots”) risked invalidating the results and required a relevant amount of work to clean up the data. Similar activities can threat other researches and a consistent solution would be of higher importance for the academic and research community.

Then, shifting to the more specific case, it’s for sure relevant to extend the study to other companies and to generalize it at an industry-level. First of all, other corporate-VC firms that do not offer content-based programs should be investigated to compare the results of the two analyses. Secondly, the research should deviate from corporate-based VC initiatives and investigate the impact of content-based programs on the brand of traditional VC firms, including now in the study not only the effects on the brand of the company but also on its financials and not considering anymore the costs for sustaining them as sunk-costs but as full-fledged marketing costs.