With scarce research on the intersection of corporate venturing and firm strategy, few companies succeed in using their dedicated corporate venturing units (CVUs) for strategic renewal. This study examines this intersection in so-called interlinked-ambidextrous CVUs. Through relational interlinks with internal and external stakeholders, these organizational entities combine the exploration of new market opportunities with the exploitation of existing core competencies to develop new competitive advantages for their parent companies. That way, they aim to create organizationally consequential new business that can change the competitive positioning of a company. To investigate such strategic corporate venturing, the study collects and analyses qualitative data from interlinked-ambidextrous units in 16 European companies. The resulting key themes and their relationships are mapped onto an exploratory model of strategic corporate venturing that includes organizational context factors as antecedents; process activities, relational mechanisms and dynamic capabilities as enablers; and an ambidextrous orientation as a mediator for the intended strategic renewal task. Embedding these key findings within existing theory provides valuable contributions to the development of the strategic corporate venturing concept and the understanding of interlinked-ambidextrous CVUs. This can help practitioners tackle the strategic renewal challenge through corporate venturing.

The publication-based dissertation investigates how to leverage corporate venturing units for the continuous stra- tegic renewal of established companies. It includes four self-contained research papers, from which three are de- veloped for publication in peer-reviewed academic journals, and one for publication as an academic teaching case study. The first paper uses the methodology of a systematic literature review to integrate different research streams of organizational ambidexterity, dynamic capabilities, and corporate venturing. As a result, it provides an inte- grated framework and identifies interlinked-ambidextrous corporate venturing units as a promising research av- enue for strategic corporate venturing. The second paper applies a multiple-case study approach to differentiate contemporary corporate venturing units from a strategic renewal perspective. As a result, it can provide a novel typology and suggest a first organizational framework for strategic corporate venturing. The third paper investi- gates the identified interlinked-ambidextrous corporate venturing units deeper through additional qualitative data collection and analysis. This results in a proposed organizational model of strategic corporate venturing with spe- cific organizational antecedents alongside process activities, dynamic capabilities and organizational interlinks as possible enablers, and ambidextrous orientation as a possible mediator to develop organizationally consequential new business. The fourth paper helps to apply these findings by describing the strategic renewal challenge of the digital scale-up Freeletics and leading through the organizational set-up of a suitable strategic corporate venturing project in the teaching note. To integrate all papers within one dissertation, they are framed with an introductory and concluding section. The introduction describes the overall need and motivation for the research and intro- duces the key theoretical concepts as well as the four research papers and their publication status. The concluding section provides theoretical and practical implications, as well as limitations and future research opportunities across all included papers. Altogether, the dissertation enhances existing corporate venturing theory to better lev- erage the concept for strategic renewal and provides new insights into the establishing and application of dynamic capabilities and organizational ambidexterity in dedicated corporate venturing units.

In times of changing business environments, firms must constantly renew their competitive advantage by establishing dynamic capabilities. While often attempting to employ this in corporate venturing activities, they face the challenge of simultaneously exploring new and exploiting existing business opportunities. Examining possible approaches to mastering this feat of ‘organizational ambidexterity’ reveals an extensive but scattered picture. To better integrate this effort by assessing how corporate venturing is linked with organizational ambidexterity in the literature and identifying possible organizational setups, this systematic literature review builds on a sample of 172 studies. Based on different dimensions of dynamic capabilities, the analysis indicates that corporate venturing may take a solely explorative or an exploitative role, or balance both, to directly enable organizational ambidexterity, following a ‘trade-off’, respectively ‘paradox’, school of thought. As a result, this paper identifies four different setups of corporate venturing in an integrated framework, based on the ability and approach to enabling organizational ambidexterity. Here, the synthesis in the proposed framework of the studies examined allows differentiating between not directly ambidextrous separated or integrated corporate venturing and directly ambidextrous contextual or interlinked corporate venturing. As a novel contribution to the fields of strategic management, organizational change and corporate entrepreneurship, this integrated perspective suggests an often overlooked, potentially more strategic role for corporate venturing in the strategic renewal of a firm’s competitive advantage, thus building the basis for further empirical research on strategic corporate venturing approaches for organizational ambidexterity and their application in practice.