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ractitioner accounts and studies about corporate venture capital:

Asset Alternatives, "Corporate Venturing Bounces Back, With Internet Acting as Springboard," Private Equity Analyst, 6 (August 1996) pages 1 and 18-19.

Zenas Block and Oscar A. Ornati, "Compensating Corporate Venture Managers," Journal of Business Venturing, 2 (1987) pages 41-52.

Norman D. Fast, The Rise and Fall of Corporate New Venture Divisions, Ann Arbor, UMI Research Press, 1978.

G. Felda Hardymon, Mark J. DeNino, and Malcolm S. Salter, "When Corporate Venture Capital Doesn't Work," Harvard Business Review, 61 (May-June 1983) pages 114-120.

E. Lawler and J. Drexel, The Corporate Entrepreneur, Los Angeles, Center for Effective Organizations, Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Southern California, 1980.

Kenneth W. Rind, "The Role of Venture Capital in Corporate Development," Strategic Management Journal, 2 (April 1981) pages 169-180.It is interesting to note that the primary motivation in 1946 for the founders of the world's first private equity fund, American Research and Development, was largely not the creation of profits. Rather it was the encouragement of economic growth in the United States and New England. As founder (and former Harvard Business School professor) General Georges Doriot responded, when confronted by some investors who complained about the slow progress of many of his investments:

You sophisticated stockholders make five points and sell out. But we have our hearts in our companies: we are really doctors of childhood diseases here. When bankers or brokers tell me I should sell an ailing company, I ask them, "Would you sell a child running a temperature of 104?" [ Patrick Liles, Sustaining the Venture Capital Firm, Cambridge, Management Analysis Center, 1977, page 70.]

While American Research and Development sought to combine social goals with profits, the Small Business Investment Company (SBIC) program is generally regarded as the first explicit "social venture capital" endeavor. This program was launched by the U.S. government in 1958 in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's launch of the world's first satellite, Sputnik. The level of social venture activity remained relatively modest until the late 1970s. During the past fifteen years, over one hundred state and federal initiatives have been launched. European and Asian nations have also undertaken many similar initiatives. While these programs' precise structures have differed, the efforts have been predicated on two shared assumptions: (i) that the private sector provides insufficient capital to new firms, at least in certain regions or industries, and (ii) that the government can identify firms where investments will ultimately yield high social and/or private returns.

While the sums of money involved are modest relative to public expenditures on defense procurement or retiree benefits, these programs are very substantial when compared to contemporaneous private investments in new firms. For instance, the SBIC program led to the provision of more than $3 billion to young firms between 1958 and 1969, more than three times the total private venture capital investment during these years. In 1995, the sum of the financing provided through and guaranteed by social venture capital programs in the United States was at least $2.4 billion. This sum was substantial