Assessing the impact of public venture capital programmes in the United Kingdom: Do regional characteristics matter?

•We analyse the impact of regional characteristics on public VC funds' performance.•We compare public (regional and governmental) VC funds with private VC funds.•VC performance varies depending on the level of regional innovation intensity.•We find important performance differences among the different types of VC funds analysed.

This article analyses whether and how the impact of publicly backed venture capital (VC) funds varies across regions, depending on their level of innovation intensity and in comparison with private VC funds. Building on agency and human capital theories, the authors distinguish public VC funds into regional and governmental types, to assess potential differences in the performance of their portfolio companies. The analyses rely on a sample of 628 VC-backed companies in the United Kingdom during 1998–2007, and they confirm that regional characteristics matter for rigorous assessments of the effectiveness of public VC programmes.