Understanding Corporate Social Incubators: Qualitative Evidence from Europe

In this day and age, the world is facing major challenges: growing inequalities, climate change, pandemics, wars. The concern of people towards these issues has generally changed even compared to twenty years ago. Given their size, worldwide presence, and influence, multinational corporations possess a distinct advantage in effectively tackling these challenges. Therefore, various stakeholders - public and private institutions, customers - are becoming more demanding on them and regulations are increasing. These topics also have more internal, direct effects on corporations. Being seen as active on social and environmental causes might have a good effect on employee retention. Moreover, this behaviour can be seen from a risk mitigation perspective: climate change, resource scarcity, and social unrest can negatively impact supply chains and disrupt operations, affecting long-term profitability. Also new business opportunities can be exploited as the market for sustainable products and services grows. As a consequence, corporations are becoming increasingly interested in being engaged with activities that generate a positive social and environmental impact. One way to be involved in these activities is through corporate social incubators (CSIs). Corporate incubators are startup incubators with the active involvement of one or more established firms. We talk about CSIs when the startups participating to these programmes deliver services and products seeking to have a positive social and environmental impact. This thesis investigates the advantages and disadvantages of a particular type of incubator known as CSI and is based on previous thesis student works on the same topic. It is focused on four European countries (Italy, Spain, UK, and Ireland) to try delivering a comprehensive European landscape. More specifically, the aim of this work is answering to the research question “what are the processes of incubation, obstacles faced by actors, and social and economic outcomes of Corporate Social Business Incubator programs?”. The more effective way to answer this question was directly interviewing the actors who participated to these programmes, namely corporations and startups, asking them specific questions about the experience they had. The thesis begins with a detailed literature review on topics of interest for CSIs, from open innovation and open social innovation to an analysis of the existing types of incubators and related practical examples. This review was useful to have a comprehensive understand of the current landscape of open innovation and startup incubators, as well as to underline the outcomes and challenges involved. Subsequently, the methodology is shown, as well as the qualitative data gathered through interviews. This data served as an input for a framework describing the processes of CSIs. Based on both data and processes shown, more detailed conclusions are drawn, showing how the collaboration works and the related challenges when corporations and startups are involved in CSIs.