Is Integration the New Incubation? A Systematic Literature Review on the Shift from Supply to Demand Models of Corporate-Startup Engagement
best paper nominee
License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
abstract
As corporations increasingly adopt open innovation strategies, engaging with startups has become vital. Corporate accelerators (CA) and venture clienting (VCL) offer distinct approaches to startup collaboration: supply-driven incubation and demand-driven integration. While CAs have been widely implemented, their impact on long-term innovation integration remains debated. VCL emphasizes direct business application, but is only emerging in research. Drawing on a systematic literature review of 46 publications, we analyze each model's key phases and how challenges manifest in design and outcome alignment. Our findings highlight that accelerators support exploratory innovation and ecosystem engagement but lack mechanisms for adoption. VCL promotes problem-driven, measurable innovation with higher demands on startup maturity. Despite its increasing adoption in practice, the lack of academic research on VCL is surprising. This study contributes a conceptual foundation for future empirical studies and calls for deeper investigation into VCL's mechanisms and startups' perspectives.
why this paper
This project started because I was fed up with TUM and didn’t particularly feel like working for some random startup as part of my mandatory Interdisciplinary Project.
Over lunch, Dr. Tobias Riasanow (Tobi) suggested I could do the project at SAP alongside my working student position. We started brainstorming what startup engagement at SAP could look like. Initially, we were thinking about a classical accelerator, but while reading up on the different models I quickly realized that venture clienting was actually much closer to what we had in mind.
After doing the background research and presenting my results, Leonard and Tobi thought the work was worth turning into a paper. And since we figured we might as well submit somewhere nice, we chose HICSS in Hawaii.
Getting a best paper nomination out of what started as an attempt to avoid a mandatory university project was a pretty nice outcome.
None of this would have been possible without Tobi, who made the original project possible and supported it all the way to publication.