Innovative Technology-Based Startup–Large Firm Collaborations: Influence of Human and Social Capital on Engagement and Success

Successful collaborative innovation between startups and large firms can be considered fruitful complementary combinations that can respond effectively and rapidly to grand challenges. Further research is needed on the knowledge-based resources of entrepreneurial teams that influence their performance. Moreover, the relational dimension and processual view of asymmetric startup–large firm collaborations have rarely been investigated from the startups’ perspective. Our first objective is to understand which elements of startup founding teams’ human and social capital impact their R&D versus business engagement in collaborations with large firms. The second is to understand which fine-grained components of proximity forms contribute to collaborative success. In this article, we address these issues by employing structural equation modeling combined with Fisher's exact test contingency analysis, which results in a processual framework contributing to the literature on entrepreneurial teams, collaborations between startups and corporations, and operationalization of the proximity theory. Our results show that in addition to technological knowledge, educational diversity, entrepreneurial education, and open social capital are critical dimensions for startup founding teams to engage in an R&D collaboration with a large firm. Our results also underscore the significant positive effect of social proximity, organizational proximity (intermediary), and cognitive proximity (technology) on collaboration success.