I really enjoyed Matthew Wansley’s new paper, Moonshots, forthcoming in the Columbia Business Review.  He focuses on the complicated incentives involved in performing “moonshot” research, that is, highly risky projects that could dramatically advance a field, but that will take years to develop.  He argues that the venture carveout structure – whereby a startup has public company parents alongside other private investors, and employee incentive ownership, is designed to mitigate the various conflicts and agency costs that would exist among the players, and uses autonomous driving as the major case study.

I haven’t seen much about corporate investment in outside entities – though I gather there has been more written in the business literature, the only other legal paper I’m familiar with is Jennifer Fan’s Catching Disruptions: Regulating Corporate Venture Capital, 2018 Colum. Bus. L. Rev. 341, which offers a detailed descriptive account of how corporate venture capital functions and how it differs from traditional venture capital.  But the two papers together convince me that this is a phenomenon that needs more attention in the legal scholarship.