Brinkmann and Kanbach conduct a systematic review of 190 articles to explain why corporate venture capitalists consistently have shorter lifespans than independent venture capitalists, despite CVC investment reaching a then-record $169.3 billion in 2021, up 142% year over year, even during the pandemic. The review identifies 41 factors influencing VC lifespan across four dimensions, strategic decision-making, exploitation of VC resources and characteristics, active involvement in the VC ecosystem, and limited room for maneuvering, and finds these dimensions shape IVC and CVC decision-making differently in ways that directly affect how long each type of investor survives. Despite CVCs generally yielding greater financial performance than IVCs, the authors identify five CVC-specific factors that help explain their comparatively shorter lifespans: investment objectives, organizational autonomy and structure, interorganizational relationships, corporate parent commitment, and parent company compensation practices.

Corporations building or evaluating their own CVC arm get a genuinely counterintuitive, evidence-based finding worth planning around, that CVCs actually outperform independent VCs financially yet still tend to shut down sooner, which means strong returns alone are not enough to guarantee a CVC unit's survival within a parent organization. The five specific CVC-lifespan factors, investment objectives, autonomy, interorganizational relationships, parent commitment, and compensation, give corporate leaders a concrete diagnostic checklist for structuring a CVC unit to survive longer, rather than a vague sense that corporate politics or budget cuts are simply unavoidable risks. Founders deciding between a corporate and independent VC investor also benefit from understanding this lifespan gap, since a CVC unit with a shorter expected lifespan introduces a distinct kind of continuity risk to a cap table that founders should weigh alongside the strategic benefits a corporate investor might otherwise offer.