When opposites attract: a review and synthesis of corporate-startup collaboration

Research on corporate-startup coll aboration has accelerated during the last two decades, and scholars have started to distinguish underlying drivers and challenges when these two types of partners engage to innovate. Despite accumulating insights, however, the body of literature on corporate-startup collaboration is rather fragmented with little integration, impeding the extent to which different perspectives can inform and draw from each other in finding ways to improve the collaboration between corporates and startups. In this paper, we conduct a systematic literature review and apply a paradox perspective to bring together separated domains of research about corporate-startup collaboration. In particular, our framework identifies four organisational tensions that manifest in corporate-startup collaboration and explains distinct coping mechanisms across different levels of analysis. Our emergent framework highlights the multifaceted nature of corporate-startup collaboration and provides various new avenues of research moving forward.