Corporate accelerators have emerged rapidly over the last few years and have become a cross-industrial global phenomenon. Established companies interact with startups through these programmes in a structured approach. Recent academic research shows that programmes exist with diverse characteristics, providing various resources and services such as investment capital, office space, mentoring or training to the startups. Currently, the corporate accelerator landscape is undergoing change, with companies adjusting their programme characteristics. One reason for this development seems to be that companies struggle to provide the right resources to startups. The extant corporate accelerator literature, however, does not provide any insights into the value of the different resources provided to startups in such programmes. Thus, we analyse, empirically and in-depth, one of the longest active corporate accelerator programmes, taking the startups' perspective. Investigating Wayra, the corporate accelerator of Telefónica in Germany, we shed light on what is satisfying, what is relevant and what corporates can improve on.

The modern landscape of corporate venturing (CV) is emerging and has undergone increasingly rapid evolutions over the past two decades. A growing heterogeneity of CV modes can be observed such as corporate accelerators, corporate incubators, corporate venture capital, and strategic partnerships with startups. Selecting the appropriate mode is critical given that most corporations struggle to find the proverbial needle in the haystack. Furthermore, scholars’ examination of CV is fragmented and iolves competing frameworks and typologies, which fails to provide practitioners with a better understanding of how to effectively choose between distinct CV activities. Building upon a systematic review of the literature, the research question addressed in this paper is: Which CV modes and dimensions can be identified in the literature and how can they be categorized comprehensively? To address this, I propose a reconciliation of various CV dimensions by constructing a framework enhanced with practical examples derived from expert interviews. Going beyond the highly dispersed work on CV I strive to (1) identify, organize, and integrate the relevant literature on corporate venturing activities; (2) analyze the dimensions that have been proposed by scholars to categorize and characterize distinct CV activities; and (3) harmonize competing approaches and introduce a coherent and reconciled framework that organizes CV modes along ‘inside-in’, ‘inside-out’, and ‘outside-in’ innovation flows, thus helping practitioners and scholars alike better understand and choose more appropriately between discrete CV modes in relation to specific objectives.

In this paper we qualitatively explore the phenomenon of company builders – a new form of venture incubation that has only recently been established. The paper distinguishes company builders from other incubation models, analyses their organizational structure and maps their new venture creation process. Based on a multiple case study of nine company builders located in three European start-up hubs, we find that organizational structures of company builders are dependent on organization size. Company builders with less than 50 employees tend to feature functional line organizations, while larger company builders feature project-matrix organizations. In terms of venture creation process, company builders follow a seven step process, which is mapped in terms of inputs, activities and outputs. We discuss the implications of this study for the extant literature and offer directions for future research.