textPrior studies have emphasized that structural attributes are crucial to simultaneously pursuing exploration and exploitation, yet our understanding of antecedents of ambidexterity is still limited. Structural differentiation can help ambidextrous organizations to maintain multiple inconsistent and conflicting demands; however, differentiated exploratory and exploitative activities need to mobilized, coordinated, integrated, and applied. Based on this idea, we delineate formal and informal senior team integration mechanisms (i.e. contingency rewards and social integration) and formal and informal organizational integration mechanisms (i.e. cross-functional interfaces and connectedness) and examine how they mediate the relationship between structural differentiation and ambidexterity. Overall, our findings suggest that the previously asserted direct effect of structural differentiation on ambidexterity operates through informal senior team (i.e. senior team social integration) and formal organizational (i.e. cross-functional interfaces) integration mechanisms. Through this richer explanation and empirical assessment, we contribute to a greater clarity and better understanding of how organizations may effectively pursue exploration and exploitation simultaneously to achieve ambidexterity.

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Structural Differentiation and Ambidexterity: The Mediating Role of Integration Mechanisms

Advanced Corporate Innovation Systems - Comparing Requirements for New Product Development and Business Model Innovation


Purpose
This paper aims to review the existing literature on structured corporate–startup collaboration programs (SCSCPs) concerning their objectives and organizational design components. The design components of the program execution are analyzed on how they impact knowledge transfer and how the extant literature on SCSCP considers the knowledge management topic. A new perspective to examine its ramifications will be discussed.


Design/methodology/approach
Through an integrative literature review, 103 papers on the topic of SCSCP are analyzed about references of objectives and design components of the programs.


Findings
The literature shows a strong focus on strategic objectives corporations pursue in implementing an SCSCP. The design components can be divided into governance mode, structural decisions, selection of ventures, program execution and follow up.


Research limitations/implications
The literature review shows a lack of insights into the knowledge transfer process between the corporation and the ventures. Therefore, this study suggests a practice-based, longitudinal perspective on the interaction processes that occur during the program execution of an SCSCP.


Originality/value
Compared to existing literature reviews, the study takes the corporation’s perspective on incubation and acceleration and reveals design components specific to the corporate forms. Furthermore, SCSCPs center around strategic value generation and the design of the programs can vary highly. It is proposed that knowledge transfer is the central aspect of corporate programs and that a practice-based perspective would enrich the research on knowledge transfer in highly complex setups like this.


More than a handshake – knowledge transfer in structured corporate–startup collaboration programs

Multinational corporations increasingly establish corporate incubators to combine their own resources with complementary resources of nascent ventures. In order to fulfill their parent's strategic objectives, corporate incubators need to turn into highly efficient resource brokers. The cross-regional embeddedness of incubation hubs leads to a high diversity of involved stakeholders and a complex resource flow among them, which requires a particular organizational design of the corporate incubator. In this context, results of this paper incorporate the recommendation of striking a critical balance between autonomy and integration that might shift depending on the parent's strategic orientation. Furthermore, this research contributes to existing literature by providing an understanding of corporate incubators as a multinational phenomenon, which has been neglected so far. Therefore, the study applies a multiple case study approach including 18 semi-structured interviews with incubation managers.

Lisa Scholl

Papers

Incubation in Multinational Corporations