Corporate incubation : factors influencing mutual success of technology ventures and their corporate partners

Abstract

In today's competitive business environment continuous innovation should be on the strategy map, not only of technology oriented new ventures but also of established and successful corporations. New ventures are an effective breeding environment for innovative ideas, whether they stem from a university or corporate environment. But they are frequently lacking key resources and business know-how to successfully bring innovations to a broad market. Due to their newness and smallness they have problems attracting the right partners at the right time and getting access to crucial complementary assets. Corporate incubation (CI), an element of a corporate venturing strategy, could be a missing link for both parties' problems. The corporation could benefit from the entrepreneurial environment and the young firm could benefit from an extensive resource and know-how pool. For such a long-term corporate-venture partnership a clear strategic fit and shared goals are important for success. The aim of this master's thesis is to investigate conditions and factors enabling success in corporate incubation programs from both the corporate and the venture perspective. Further, it addresses the question of which measures could improve goal congruity. Based on a review of the extant literature on corporate incubation and related domains, this thesis identifies key success factors from the corporate perspective. In order to investigate the venture perspective, four semi-structured interviews with executives from technology start-ups are carried out and analyzed. Building on these two results a comparison of both perspectives is performed, and measures are developed to potentially better align goals. This research shows that open communication, fairness and trust, venture independence, direct access to resources, a committed co-ownership, and an experienced CI management team are important factors to achieve mutual goals. The findings therefore have important practical implications for venture teams and incubation managers to improve joint success in corporate incubation.