The Effect of Corporate — Start-Up Collaborations on Corporate Entrepreneurship

Abstract

In an attempt to become more flexible and responsive, corporates increasingly collaborate with start-ups. By doing so, corporates hope to make a transition towards a more entrepreneurial organization or to rejuvenate their organizational culture and working practices. We present the results of a multiple case study in which we compare eight corporate—start-up collaborations that achieved different success rates in terms of promoting corporate renewal. Our focus is on the corporate individuals that participate in the collaboration and we combine literature on corporate entrepreneurship with institutional theory to study the conditions under which these individuals are more likely to exhort transformational agency and to contribute to renewal. Our results indicate that the effect of corporate—start-up collaborations on renewal is mediated by two individual-level mechanisms: reflexivity and intrinsic motivation. In addition, we identify several organizational contingencies that affect both the likelihood that corporate individuals adopt a reflexive orientation and are intrinsically motivated as well as the likelihood that their transformational efforts are successful.