Investment project as an internal corporate venture

A capital investment project exhibits both deliberate and emergent strategic elements. The emergent strategic elements have been conceptualized as a project strategy, which is formed in a project to attain business-oriented results and to cope with organizational and market environments. We use corporate venturing literature to explain the formation of the strategy of an individual project. In the project studies that consider the deliberate strategic elements with projects, a project has been explained to solely implement the strategy of its parent organization: This paper addresses the relationship between a project and its parent and explains how the dimensions of the parent-project relationship affect the formation of a project's strategy which may diverge from the intended strategy of the parent. The empirical study is a case study on four investments projects in Neste Oil, a firm operating in the oil refining industry. The projects have a degree of autonomy in relation to the parent, depending on their relatedness to the existing capabilities of the parent.

► We study capital investment projects as internal corporate ventures.
► Project-parent relationship is analyzed with dimensions of relatedness and autonomy.
► The parent should grant a project autonomy based on the relatedness of the project.
► Autonomy enables the formation of an individual strategy in a project.
► An investment project can renew the strategy of the parent organization.