Research on the key business model components influence on decisions of venture capital investment

• Main Author: Zeng, L. (Lulu)
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: University of Oulu 2014
• Subjects: Management and International Business
• Online Access: http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:oulu-201406101734; http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:fi:oulu-201406101734

With the development of high-technology and coming ages of internet-based business, there is an increasing number of e-commerce business plans has been sent to venture capitalists to raising capital funds. Venture capitalists have their certain rules to select ideal business plans. Business plans, as the initial stage of business models have become a heated topic in recent years. In order to make sure the investment is profitable, both venture capitalists and entrepreneurs should bear in mind which parts are important in venture firms. Based on the phenomena, the research is made to bridge the business model with venture capital investment and find out what are the key components from business model influence venture capitalists’ interests. The thesis has three main parts: First, the thesis reviewed the existing literatures of business model and venture capital investments. And selected influencing factors for venture capital decisions and the conceptualization method of business model for analysis. Second, based on the selected factors and conceptualization model, the thesis selected and modified the factors which are consisted in business model components and built a research framework for empirical analysis. And last, the research designed a questionnaire for venture capital related respondents, in order to find out what are key factors influence their decisions. All the answers were analyzed by statistical analysis tool SPSS, and the Factor Analysis method was used to extract major factors which influence venture capitalists’ choices from business model components. The results of the research has found out that there are 8 main factors: markets and customers, products and technologies, external environments, organizational designs, entrepreneurs’ personalities, and finances. And from the 8 main factors, answers from the respondents showed that the markets and customers, and products and technologies are the most important elements for their investment decision. On the contrary, finance issues are the least important.