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To understand how corporations and startups can better collaborate, researchers studied 150 meetings between 108 deep tech startups and 34 corporations. They found that collaborations that moved past the first meeting shared three characteristics: They had clarity about their current and future needs; they were open-minded to the novel ideas of startups; and they assembled a team of technologists, business developers, and decision-makers who could engage with the current and future opportunities that the startups presented.

Support systems for early venturing efforts need to be harmonious with the emergent nature of those efforts. With current literature treating the conceptions of new ventures as exogenous, there has been limited focus on the transition of venturing efforts from nebulous, open-ended, and accidental toward becoming scalable, focused, and deliberate. We develop a dynamic model for organizing support systems for the early phases of new-venture creation, where scattered ideas evolve into venture concepts as tokens, frames, and premises for further action. By viewing venturing efforts and opportunities as emergent and drawing on the literature on complexity and organizational space, we propose openness, self-selection, visibility, and connectivity as the defining characteristics for organizing support systems. In contrast to literature's predominant focus on a predictive, linear approach, we expand the theoretical scope of support systems to include organizing that is more attuned to the uncertain and nonlinear nature of new venture creation that they support. Our work has broader implications for organizing uncertain early-phase development processes.

Current literature presents the antecedents of business model design as a given managerial choice. In complex and uncertain environments, there might not be enough information for the managers to make choices as the options for creating and capturing value have to coevolve with emerging innovations. We argue for how business model design and its antecedents differ and develop a process model that shows how and when a firm can generate business model designs in complex innovation. Through the principles of design under complexity, our model develops a non-predictive approach that connects emerging complex-innovations to the antecedents of their business models, whereby a focal firm engages in the collaborative generation of business model design alternatives. Thereby we extend the understanding of the business model design and its antecedents under complex and uncertain environments.

The business incubation process evolves through coach-incubatee interactions rather than merely institutional intervention. We contribute to a behavioral understanding of this process by exploring the determinants and expression of docility, a fundamental human behavior. Our findings suggest that business coaches’ perceptions of stakeholder value creation needs and their experience of incubatees’ proactive behavior are essential determinants of coaching behavior. These behavioral determinants lead coaches to place idiosyncratic expectations on and become responsive to incubatees, and this is reflected in the range of their interventions in new venture creation. From a behavioral perspective, the outcome of coaches’ interventions is a shared understanding of how to navigate the ambiguous and uncertain aspects of new venturing. Adopting a behavioral approach thus helps us to reframe business incubation—previously regarded to be a structured process—as a flexible process, more accurately capturing its role in facilitating the highly uncertain process of new venture creation.

What is the value of startup–corporate collaboration? For corporates, collaboration means adding value through innovations and new knowledge flows as well as learning from startup culture.

The purpose of this article is to develop an understanding of business incubation along its temporal dimensions from a value creation perspective. We explore the temporal dimensions of business incubation by conducting a case study of six Swedish incubators with 43 semi-structured interviews of entrepreneurs and incubator coaches and managers. We show that temporality could be understood along the content and process of value creation. Such a delineation brings out the temporal tensions associated with the value creation processes in incubation. Our study adds to the current incubator literature by providing a more comprehensive explanation of its processes from a value creation perspective.

How support systems such as a business incubator deal with failure, a common phenomenon in new venture creation, is less understood. Employing a value creation perspective helps us to understand failure, the inability of an entrepreneurial team to build a scalable business model. Based on case studies at nine Swedish business incubators, we develop a dynamic process model towards understanding failure prevention and management in business incubation. We find business incubation practices towards failure prevention and management to be a mix of predictive and non-predictive strategies. These practices could help prevent and mitigate failure at personal, organisational and social levels towards value creation for the startups and their stakeholders and channel the effects of failure towards social benefit.

Existing new venture creation support systems are mainly based on linear and predictive logic, which does not reflect the reality of new venturing. By focussing on the non-predictive logic of entrepreneurial opportunities, we bring forth the emergence and non-linearity that defines the support system. Using the design science approach, we offer specific design propositions to help organize early phase new venture creation support systems. Thereby, we bridge the gap between ‘what is’ and ‘what could be’ in the emergence of entrepreneurial opportunities in a support system.

Current discussions on business incubation tend to ignore the role of participant behavior. From a theoretical perspective we focus on how docility, a fundamental social asset in decision deliberation as applied in Herbert Simon’s theory of social learning, holds the key in terms of understanding the incubation of new ventures. We explore the manifestation of docility in the behavior of incubatees and business coaches, and consider how its presence promotes progress in incubation and value-creation activities. The findings enhance understanding of collaborative new-venture creation in the context of business incubation from a behavioral perspective.

The global aviation industry is facing complex and unpredictable market conditions with fluctuating oil prices and the adverse environmental impact of aircraft operations. Since the regulatory approval for biofuels, the first biojet fuel flight test in 2007, using a blend fuel, was a remarkable step towards having more test and schedule flights up to the year of 2014. The purpose of this paper is to engage this new alternative energy with the issues that airlines associate with sustainability, mainly focusing on aircraft operations and profitability. The key findings suggest that the uses of alternative energy need to be in parallel to the reliability and maintainability of the aircraft system, so that the adoption of biofuels can be effective.