Evaluating Corporate-Startup Co-Creation: A Critical Review Of The Literature

Partnership with startups offers large firms knowledge about, and access to new technologies. Incumbents’ emphasis on corporate-startup collaboration has therefore reached a new level and various models for corporate-startup collaboration can now be found among large enterprises. “Co-creation” between large firms and technology startups, is one of these models that increases in traction. The model is, however, under-researched and research on frameworks and metrics for evaluating the business effects from corporate-startup co-creation is scarce. The purpose of this paper is therefore to extend the existing body of knowledge by investigating frameworks and metrics for evaluating corporate-startup “co-creation” and to suggest a framework for evaluation of corporate-startup co-creation programs. A literature review on identified frameworks and metrics is presented, covering research findings on evaluation models for corporate-startup collaboration. The main finding in this paper is a “multi-stakeholder framework” for evaluating the collaboration’s results in corporate-startup co-creation models.