Evaluating corporate-startup collaboration: A government perspective

Government authorities are seeking new, cost-effective ways to stimulate growth and job creation by increasingly favoring the development of innovation ecosystems. Corporate-startup collaboration as a phenomenon has therefore progressively been supported by government authorities as a way of simultaneously helping startups to scale and providing opportunities for incumbents to renew themselves. However, evaluating the results of such collaborations is complex, which means that it can be a challenge for any government agency to evaluate its related interventions. This paper is explorative and based on empirical data from a study of the Swedish innovation agency, Vinnova. The purpose is to improve our understanding on how governments today evaluate government funded corporate-startup collaboration initiatives and how evaluations can be improved by utilizing methods based on theory-driven and realist approaches. An evaluation framework for policy makers based on a theory-driven and learning cycle approach is presented in this paper.