Characteristics for Collaboration Types between Corporates and Startups

Established manufacturing corporates are facing major challenges today, as more and more technology-based startups are disrupting existing market competitors and are striving to gain foothold in new markets. Therefore, it can be observed that corporates and startups are increasingly seeking collaborations in order to gain advantageous access to resources, markets or even technologies from the respective partner. However, the majority of these collaborations fail for two reasons: first, the opportunistic choice of a collaboration type and, second, a poor suitability of established types of collaboration for technology-based startups. Consequently, the solution developed in this paper aims at addressing these problems by initially deriving a suitable collaboration framework based on strategic success potentials. Starting from identified requirements, a characteristic space for types of collaboration is determined. Based on this investigation, the paper shows which of the newly determined characteristics help fulfil strategically relevant success potentials of collaboration and, thus, enable a well-founded typification of collaboration types.