Fostering Intrapreneurship through the Implementation of Internal Corporate Accelerators

Today’s markets are characterized by fast and radical changes, posing an essential challenge to established companies. Startups, yet, seem to be more capable in developing radical innovations to succeed in those volatile markets. Thus, established companies started to experiment with various approaches to implement startup-like structures in their organization. Internal corporate accelerators (ICAs) are a novel form of corporate venturing, aiming to foster bottom-up innovations through intrapreneurship. However, ICAs still lack empirical investigations. This work contributes to a deeper understanding of the interface between the ICA and the core organization and the respective support activities (resource access and support services) that create an innovation-supportive work environment for the intrapreneurial team. The results of this qualitative study, comprising 12 interviews with ICA teams out of two German high-tech companies, show that the resources provided by ICAs differ from the support activities of external accelerators. Further, the study shows that some resources show both supportive as well as obstructive potential for the intrapreneurial teams within the ICA

Software Startups -- A Research Agenda

Software startup companies develop innovative, software-intensive products within limited time frames and with few resources, searching for sustainable and scalable business models. Software startups are quite distinct from traditional mature software companies, but also from micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises, introducing new challenges relevant for software engineering research. This paper's research agenda focuses on software engineering in startups, identifying, in particular, 70+ research questions in the areas of supporting startup engineering activities, startup evolution models and patterns, ecosystems and innovation hubs, human aspects in software startups, applying startup concepts in non-startup environments, and methodologies and theories for startup research. We connect and motivate this research agenda with past studies in software startup research, while pointing out possible future directions. While all authors of this research agenda have their main background in Software Engineering or Computer Science, their interest in software startups broadens the perspective to the challenges, but also to the opportunities that emerge from multi-disciplinary research. Our audience is therefore primarily software engineering researchers, even though we aim at stimulating collaborations and research that crosses disciplinary boundaries. We believe that with this research agenda we cover a wide spectrum of the software startup industry current needs