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Ferran Giones (University of Stuttgart)

Cristobal Garcia-Herrera (Imperial College Business School)

Raj Shankar (Nord University)

Sheryl Winston Smith (BI Norwegian Business School)

Bram Timmermans (NHH Norwegian School of Economics)

In the face of disruption, large corporations constantly struggle to secure efficiency and longterm sustainability (Andriopoulos & Lewis 2009; Raisch & Birkinshaw 2008). To proactively adaptto disruption, these firms increasingly engage with startups to explore potential futures and identify desirable industry architectures that help ensure their survival (Ahuja & Novelli 2016; Kim & Steensma 2017; Cozzolino et al. 2021). To achieve this, corporates have adopted structures and processes to engage, rather than compete, with entrepreneurial ventures (Bonzom & Netessine 2016; Weiblen & Chesbrough 2015).

Although more classic forms such as corporate venture capital (CVC) units that operate as "windows" into new technologies have been extensively studied (e.g., Benson & Ziedonis 2009; Dushnitsky & Lenox 2005, 2006), reports reveal there is a broad diversity of engagement forms and potential outcomes that are included in the overall corporate - startup collaboration theme (Brigl et al. 2019). The corporate's degree of control and strategic commitment is substantially different whether this collaboration takes place in a corporate venturing, incubation, or accelerator program setting (Weiblen & Chesbrough 2015). Common across these different forms is the collaboration aspect: "voluntarily helping other partners to achieve common goals or one or more of their private goals" (Castañer & Oliveira 2020: p. 987). Nevertheless, many unknowns remain as entrepreneurial ecosystems evolve and early-phase startup support systems mature (Autio et al. 2018; Nair et al. 2020).

Also, despite its increasing popularity, recent research has found that these collaborations do not always work as expected, particularly startups demonstrate to be dissatisfied with their interaction with corporates (Sopra Steria 2021; Brigl et al. 2019; Garcia-Herrera & Autio, 2020). While both might share organizational learning as a common goal in the collaboration, what they want to learn about, and how they expect to learn, turn out to be quite different. Startups observe this type of collaboration as an opportunity to gain legitimacy (e.g., Fischer et al. 2017), to secure supplier contracts, and to accelerate their venture emergence (Shankar & Shepherd 2019). At the same time, corporates expect to explore new technologies and business models, while infusing entrepreneurship into their organizations, and enabling strategic renewal and, in doing so, improve their readiness to capture new growth opportunities (Agarwal et al. 2010). Furthermore, the diversity of forms in which these collaborations take shape make it difficult to decipher what makes them more or less successful, or even harmful.

In sum, we argue that the corporate-startup collaboration setting offers a unique opportunity to study the economic performance of non-equal inter-organizational agents beyond alliances and acquisitions as well as to explore the linkages between entrepreneurial processes and innovation outcomes – at the startup, firm, and ecosystem levels – from a diversity of theoretical perspectives.