Intellectual Capital in the Venture Capital Industry

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this thesis is to answer the question: Is the present venture capital firm IC-consideration satisfactory when evaluating investment opportunities? The study is conducted with a deductive approach where a qualitative method is used to find the answer of our purpose. The research design used for this is problem analysis, where we have analyzed the views of a number of respondents through interviews. The study is based on the theories of Intellectual Capital, Venture Capital, Knowledge theory and due diligence. The thesis has its base in a number of semi-structured interviews with Venture Capitalists, Entrepreneurs and other, supporting, respondents. Our conclusions point to that the venture capital firms take intellectual capital in consideration in a satisfactory way. They do not however evaluate these in a structured quantitative way, but instead utilize a qualitative, unstructured, evaluation in order to ensure the quality of the factors. We see no added value in using a more structured IC-framework, as the VCs have such a unique insight in their investment opportunities and that every opportunity is unique, why a framework is difficult to use. Our conclusion is that the intellectual capital factors are determinative whether the venture capital firms are to invest in a venture or not, and that the more quantitative due diligence is then utilized in a later stage to determine the size of the investment. Lastly, the IC-factors do affect the value of the investment opportunity.