Venture Capital and the Financing of Innovation

1st Edition 

by Bernard Guilhon (Author), Sandra Montchaud (Author) 

The funding of innovative projects that are fundamentally ambiguous often leads to situations where decision-making is difficult. However, decision-making can be improved by practices such as syndication and step-by-step funding. The dynamic of this industry requires us to consider the economic and institutional variables that make this system coherent in English-speaking countries, but conversely reduce it to a privileged niche by the leading authorities in Europe and France.

This book proposes two guiding ideas. The first idea presents innovation as a very uncertain process. This modifies the decision-making in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, with intervention upstream in regards to stronger foundations, evaluations and selection of projects. The second idea is that the actors hold onto partial knowledge in a context where their attention span is limited. These cognitive limitations need the formation of networks, and lead to mutual and complementary dependency relations.