Anokhin, Eggers, and Kretinin study 163 corporations over four years to examine how reputation and dynamic capabilities jointly shape the international expansion of corporate venture capital (CVC) programs, finding that overall CVC reputation positively predicts a program's global footprint, and that a corporation's dynamic capabilities strengthen this relationship, with results holding across alternative ways of measuring both reputation and capabilities. Breaking reputation into distinct facets, a post-hoc analysis shows reputation for experience and reputation for active involvement with portfolio ventures both positively drive international expansion, while a reputation for intellectual property misconduct actively suppresses it, showing that not all forms of reputation operate in the same direction or with equal force. Dynamic capabilities further shape how these different reputation types translate into global reach: they strengthen the positive effect of a reputation for involvement and, notably, reverse the negative effect of a reputation for misconduct, while leaving the effect of a reputation for experience unaffected, suggesting capable corporate investors can partially overcome reputational damage from past IP conduct issues.

Corporate development executives deciding whether to invest in expanding a CVC program internationally get a genuinely useful, evidence-based reason to invest in building a track record of active portfolio involvement specifically, since that reputation facet drives global footprint independently and is further amplified by strong internal dynamic capabilities. The finding that dynamic capabilities can reverse the negative effect of an IP misconduct reputation is a genuinely counterintuitive and actionable insight for corporate investors recovering from a past scandal, suggesting that investing in organizational capability building may be a more effective repair strategy than simply waiting for reputational damage to fade. Startups considering a CVC investor with a checkered IP history get useful context for weighing that risk against the parent corporation's broader capabilities, since this research suggests a corporation with strong dynamic capabilities may behave differently going forward than its raw reputation history alone would predict.