Firms can gain plentiful advantages with internal corporate ventures. To take advantage of them, the internal corporate venture and their parent firm need a fruitful relationship. This relationship is highly based on organizational cultures, i.e., values, beliefs, and rules, within the parent firm and within the internal corporate venture. The goal of this paper is to build and maintain a beneficial and resource-sharing relationship between internal corporate ventures and their parent firms taking culture into account.
While research deepened our understanding of internal corporate venture and parent firm relationship, e.g., via dominant coalition configurations and degrees of structural separation, it did not take the culture into account and put a focus on the relationship between the top-level management and the internal corporate venture. Taking culture into account is essential because internal corporate ventures and their parent firm often have different cultures shaping the relationship and the resource exchange; not only between top-level management and the internal corporate venture but between the whole parent firm and internal corporate venture.
This exploration design science study has the goal to find novel means-ends-relationships on how the relationship between an internal corporate venture and its parent firm ‘should be’. Therefore, we use strategic action fields as a lens to acknowledge the configurational perspective, culture, and environment of the parent firm and its internal corporate venture. Induced by an empirical study with 52 interviews (44 hours), we present five design requirements and 14 design principles to form and maintain a beneficial relationship between internal corporate ventures and their parent firm. Via the design knowledge, the study contributes to (1) contextualizing the internal corporate venture and parent firm relationship regarding the social and cultural forces shaping it and (2) formulating theoretical design object knowledge to form and maintain a beneficial relationship across different organizational cultures.