Corporate Incubation: How centralized, employee-focused innovation activities enhance the hosting companies’ innovativeness

Companies in a wide range of industries increasingly build corporate incubators to meet the growing challenge of exploration and innovation while remaining efficient and productive on existing products. Particularly important for these incubators is ensuring and maintaining the relationship with the hosting company without compromising the incubator’s exploration capabilities, which is a particular challenge, owing to the structural separation of the two entities. As a result, incubators try not only to achieve the highest possible benefit for the hosting company through a wide variety of objectives and strategies, but also through a combination of different activities, which has led to a myriad of different incubation concepts. In addition to the promotion of business model innovations and the maximization of revenues, the activities mainly serve the exchange of knowledge and values, as well as the promotion of innovation behavior and the hosting company’s innovation culture and climate. All these activities are of the greatest relevance for the success of corporate incubators, but they involve many risks, causing a large number of corporate incubators to shut down or restructure continuously. In particular, researchers have, thus far, hardly investigated the activities directly aimed at the hosting company, such as knowledge and value exchange, the stimulation of innovation behavior, and the improvement of the innovation culture and climate. Especially lacking is a comprehensive classification of corporate incubators according to their different goals and strategies, such that scholars can compare them from a research perspective. It is not clear how incubators can find and promote ideas and select those with the most potential. In this context, there has been insufficient research into innovation platforms in particular how to stimulate innovation behavior. Moreover, it is not clear how a cultural change in the hosting company could materialize if its supervisors do not support it. This dissertation contributes to close these research gaps by analyzing corporate incubators’ most essential activities from a postpositivist perspective. Using three different data sets on individual, group, and incubator level including platform, longitudinal, multi-level, as well as quantitative and qualitative data, this dissertation contributes to the understanding of, first, what constitutes corporate incubators and their performance, second, how corporate incubators affect employees’ motivational processes and their subsequent innovative behavior, third, how corporate incubators can support idea generation and reflective idea selection processes, and fourth, how corporate incubators contribute to a behavioral change of innovation climate. This dissertation’s overall findings, moreover, lead to a generic model of centralized incubation. Its effects on various other research areas with similar incubation processes are discussed.