Looking for Guidance? Five Principles for Leveraging Tensions in Corporate–Startup Collaboration
Year: 2022
Type: article
Abstract: Corporate–startup collaboration (CSC) allows the co-development of innovations for pressing societal needs. Paradoxically, CSC is both fueled and challenged by diverging interests and approaches of the unequal actors. We apply a paradox lens to better understand the complex collaborative demands of CSC from the perspective of the corporate actors involved. Over the course of three years, we conducted 52 contextualized semi-structured interviews in a corporate-sponsored accelerator pursuing sustainability improvements. We identify five CSC paradoxes, which we translate into guiding principles for managing such paradoxes with a both/and mindset. Further, we show how these guiding principles help to address interdependencies between the CSC paradoxes. By disentangling the inherently paradoxical nature of the collaborative demands, we contribute to a fuller theoretical understanding of how organizational actors can manage these demands. We encourage companies engaging in CSC to use the guiding principles for empowering organizational actors’ understanding and approaches to CSC paradoxes.
Institutions: ETH Zurich, University of Zurich
Language: English
Subfield: Management of Technology and Innovation
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,250
OpenAlex ID: W4291824968