Strategic Media Venturing: Private Equity Investments as a Strategic Tool for Media Firms

Abstract

The fast-changing, highly competitive and technology-driven business environment forces established firms to continually search for new business opportunities and innovative ideas. In reaction, corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Cisco and Bertelsmann have launched new corporate venture capital (CVC) units or have intensified existing CVC activities. This chapter examines the structure, patterns and investment focus of telecommunication, IT, consumer electronics and media & entertainment firms’ CVC investments by conducting a data-mining project based on the Thomson Reuters Private Equity database. The data-mining project reveals the increasing importance of CVC activities as a strategic development tool to address the requirements of the increasing costs, speed and complexity of a technology-driven industry since the bursting of the Internet bubble. Therefore, following chapter is one of the first CVC studies to describe and compare CVC investments of the last CVC wave across industry sectors.

Citation

Hasenpusch, T.C. and Baumann, S. (2016), "Strategic Media Venturing: Private Equity Investments as a Strategic Tool for Media Firms", Mergers and Acquisitions, Entrepreneurship and Innovation (Technology, Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Competitive Strategy, Vol. 15), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 77-110. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-067X20160000015005