Exploring Strategies for Early-stage Startups in Cooperating with Large Organization through Corporate Accelerators

Sammanfattning: Startups need various resources to survive and scale, while large corporations have vast resources but search for innovations and take startups as a valuable source (Wymer and Regan, 2005). Corporate accelerators are an emerging trendy phenomenon that large organizations are adopting to collaborate with startups. Corporate accelerators take startups either from a specific industry or from all industries (Cohen and Hochberg, 2014), and achieve economic benefit either by financial returns or innovation integration (Deloitte, 2019). The types of partnerships between startups and large corporations can be classified into exploitation, exploration, or the hybrid. The exploitative partnership focus on utilizing existing capabilities from both parties, the explorative partnership aims at building new competitive advantages for involved companies, and the hybrid focus on both sides (Koza and Lewin, 2000). Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore strategies for startups to select suitable corporate accelerators and partner with large organizations. This research used the explorative method and gathered knowledge from the literature review on startups, strategic partnership and corporate accelerator and thoughts from startups via semistructured qualitative interviews. The author compared the startups’ experience and outcome in different corporate accelerators. The findings show that early-stage startups need a framework to guide their process in building partnerships with large corporations. Also, corporate accelerators were found to be a good tool that brings startups with network, corporate resources, and future customers. Moreover, the key success factors in startup-corporation partnerships are trust, clear objectives, and partner compatibility. A partnership framework was developed to facilitate startups to build partnerships with large corporations through corporate accelerators.