The Governance of Corporate-Startup Collaboration: Mechanisms, Configurations, and Trade-Offs

Abstract

Collaboration between large firms and startups is a long-standing feature of innovation and corporate development, yet less is known about how such relationships are governed in practice under conditions of structural asymmetry. This thesis examines how governance mechanisms are designed and implemented in collaborations between large industrial firms and startups, with particular attention to decision rights, monitoring mechanisms, control practices, and governance trade offs across organisational boundaries. The study adopts a qualitative and primarily deductive research design based on seven semi-structured interviews with professionals directly involved in corporate-startup collaboration. Empirically, the study approaches the phenomenon primarily from the perspective of corporate-side and corporate-facing actors involved in the design, management, and coordination of startup collaboration. The empirical material was analysed through thematic analysis, guided by concepts derived from the literature on inter-organisational collaboration, governance design, structural asymmetry, and agency theory. The findings show that corporate-startup collaboration is not governed through a single model, but through different collaboration configurations, namely investment-oriented, project-based or staged-validation, and platform- or ecosystem-mediated settings. Across these configurations, governance is shaped by recurring patterns such as mediated access, the centrality of internal corporate actors, staged commitment, partial rather than full control, and mechanisms that make collaboration visible and manageable inside the corporation. The study also shows that recurring trade-offs, including speed versus procedural coordination, autonomy versus strategic alignment, openness versus protection, early experimentation versus scale readiness, and exploration versus internal prioritisation, are not removed but managed through specific governance arrangements. Overall, the thesis argues that governance in corporate-startup collaboration is best understood as hybrid, configuration dependent, and internally mediated. Its main contribution lies in showing that collaboration functions not because tensions disappear, but because firms design governance mechanisms capable of structuring and containing them in practice.