Corporate Social Business Incubators: A new way to combine corporate entrepreneurship with social impact?

With many global wicked problems emerging daily to affect the existence of many creatures and the climate of our planet, the rising importance of social impact focused ventures has been capturing the interest of large corporates. For utilizing their vast resources and capabilities for philanthropic activities, and enabling social impact ventures to scale and materialize, corporates have been creating and funding Corporate Social Business Incubators (CSBIs). The CSBI phenomenon was found to be an ambitious dedication and a careful balancing act of the stakeholders for the corporations in previous research. This thesis approaches the CSBI phenomenon with a pragmatic point of view, qualitatively exploring the processes, obstacles, and outcomes of such incubators by examining the personal experiences of the incubated startups. This research focuses on CSBIs and startups incubated in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The data used in this research comes from videocall interviews conducted with the key figures from the CSBI incubated startups and publicly available data on CSBI programs. Processing the information obtained by interviewing the startups, it has been discovered that the CSBI programs have mostly been useful for increasing the startups’ social impact and resulted in them reaching more recognition and wider networks along with them gaining other technical competences and benefits. Based on this, by implementing improvements to combat the obstacles highlighted by the startups, CSBIs could be considered a novel and effective way to combine corporate entrepreneurship with social impact.