In an attempt to become more flexible and responsive, corporates increasingly collaborate with start-ups. By doing so, corporates hope to make a transition towards a more entrepreneurial organization or to rejuvenate their organizational culture and working practices. We present the results of a multiple case study in which we compare eight corporate—start-up collaborations that achieved different success rates in terms of promoting corporate renewal. Our focus is on the corporate individuals that participate in the collaboration and we combine literature on corporate entrepreneurship with institutional theory to study the conditions under which these individuals are more likely to exhort transformational agency and to contribute to renewal. Our results indicate that the effect of corporate—start-up collaborations on renewal is mediated by two individual-level mechanisms: reflexivity and intrinsic motivation. In addition, we identify several organizational contingencies that affect both the likelihood that corporate individuals adopt a reflexive orientation and are intrinsically motivated as well as the likelihood that their transformational efforts are successful.

为了变得更加灵活和响应迅速，企业越来越多地与初创企业合作。通过这样做，企业希望向更具企业家精神的组织过渡，或者振兴其组织文化和工作习惯。我们提供了一个多案例研究的结果，在该案例中，我们比较了八家公司与初创企业的合作，这些合作在促进公司更新方面取得了不同的成功率。我们的重点是参与合作的公司个人，我们将有关公司企业家精神的文献与制度理论相结合，以研究这些人更有可能劝告转型代理并为公司更新做出贡献的条件。我们的结果表明，企业与初创企业之间的合作对续展的影响是由两个个体层面的机制来调节的：反身性和内在动机。此外，我们确定了几种组织突发事件，这些突发事件既会影响公司个人采取反思性取向并具有内在动机的可能性，也可能影响他们的转型努力成功的可能性。