Harmonizing corporate venturing modes: an integrative review and research agenda

Abstract

The modern landscape of corporate venturing (CV) is emerging and has undergone increasingly rapid evolutions over the past two decades. A growing heterogeneity of CV modes can be observed such as corporate accelerators, corporate incubators, corporate venture capital, and strategic partnerships with startups. Selecting the appropriate mode is critical given that most corporations struggle to find the proverbial needle in the haystack. Furthermore, scholars’ examination of CV is fragmented and involves competing frameworks and typologies, which fails to provide practitioners with a better understanding of how to effectively choose between distinct CV activities. Building upon a systematic review of the literature, the research question addressed in this paper is: Which CV modes and dimensions can be identified in the literature and how can they be categorized comprehensively? To address this, I propose a reconciliation of various CV dimensions by constructing a framework enhanced with practical examples derived from expert interviews. Going beyond the highly dispersed work on CV I strive to (1) identify, organize, and integrate the relevant literature on corporate venturing activities; (2) analyze the dimensions that have been proposed by scholars to categorize and characterize distinct CV activities; and (3) harmonize competing approaches and introduce a coherent and reconciled framework that organizes CV modes along ‘inside-in’, ‘inside-out’, and ‘outside-in’ innovation flows, thus helping practitioners and scholars alike better understand and choose more appropriately between discrete CV modes in relation to specific objectives.