2023

Honarmand Shahzileh Zahra; Aghdasi Mohammad; Albadvi Amir

Digitalization has significantly increased the speed of innovation and spread of the open innovation adoption. Collaboration between established companies and startups is widely recognized as an opportunity to improve the innovation performance of all actors involved, so the importance of this collaboration has reached a new level. Hitherto research works on the collaboration have been sporadic and fragmented and, therefore, a strong theoretical framework is almost absent from this field. In this chapter, we have provided a funnel-shaped framework for designing the collaboration of large firms and startups and attempted to put together pieces of the relevant literature along the lines of three dimensions, established company, startup, and collaboration process. We have extracted the important constructs of the collaboration in each dimension. Moreover, we have introduced a funnel-shaped framework and defined four steps for the collaboration. This paper will help the large companies, startups, and other stakeholders involved in corporate–startup collaboration initiatives to become conscious of the path they are about to walk on and avoid making costly mistakes.