Abstract
My dissertation consists of six chapters, meaning it is divided into four independent studies that form its core, as well as an introductory essay and a concluding chapter. As an overarching theme, it gathers insights on how corporate-startup engagement can be successfully organized to achieve various outcomes, amid the various (epistemic) challenges inherent in arranging and evaluating the effective implementation of such collaborations. In doing so, various prominent corporate venturing modes—organizational formats typically used to facilitate corporate-startup engagement—serve as the primary unit of analysis in most of my studies, and I examine how they should be set up to effectively achieve various outcomes. Most of the studies within this dissertation thereby incorporate a (neo-)configurational perspective. More in detail, the individual parts of my dissertation are the following: In an introductory essay, I introduce the readers of this dissertation to the broader topic and underlying rationale of corporate-startup engagement, present an updated typology of prominent corporate venturing modes, and develop a framework that illustrates the various epistemic challenges in the pursuit of effective organizational setups. Deciphering effective organizational setups in the face of these challenges is an overarching research gap addressed in this dissertation. Furthermore, I explain how a configurational lens—the primary, but not exclusive, analytical perspective of my dissertation—can help address some of these issues. I then proceed to summarize whether and how the individual chapters of my dissertation relate to this agenda. Study 1 builds on (structural) inertia and institutional theory to examine a large-scale dataset on the adoption of climate neutrality strategies in response to environmental risk and other (institutional) pressures, aiming to develop a baseline understanding of the role that external and internal characteristics such as firm size and age play in organizational change and inertia to change. Study 2 is a systematic literature review of corporate accelerators, a prominent corporate venturing mode. This study employs a CIMO (Context, Interventions, Mechanisms, Outcomes) framework to inductively develop a consistent and generalizable understanding of what constitutes these accelerators within and across subtypes, and how they operate and can be configured to achieve specific outcomes. Study 3 then focuses on the legitimacy-signaling role of accelerators to external investors who provide important follow-on funding to startups. Specifically, it explores, within a configurational approach, a global dataset on how startups with certain characteristics can benefit from specific accelerator programs, in national contexts with different levels of investment attractiveness. The study presents effective accelerator configurations for different firms and contexts, and an inductively developed model of multidimensional fit to explain these findings. Study 4, then examines how corporate venture capital units—another prominent corporate venturing mode—should be configured to effectively improve corporate innovation performance and succeed amid the tensions they face at the intersection of the corporate and venture domains. It shows that the optimal organizational setup is contingent on contextual factors with multiple local optima, and that these units dynamically manage tensions through buffering and bridging mechanisms. In the final chapter of my dissertation, I summarize how my dissertation as a whole contributes to ongoing discourses in both theory and practice, beyond the individual, narrower contributions of each of my studies. I also revisit whether and how my individual studies within this dissertation address the epistemic challenges identified in the introductory essay, and what further issues and challenges remain, thus bringing the dissertation to a coherent conclusion.