Between research and practice: What science knows about venture clienting

Nikolaj Penava is a doctoral student in the field of corporate venturing at the Chair of Entrepreneurial Behavior (Prof. Dr. Rebecca Preller) and a research assistant at the Institute for Entrepreneurship & Innovation (IEI) at the University of Bayreuth. After his first entrepreneurial experiences with his own start-up during his master's degree in business administration, he developed a strong interest in corporate innovation and is currently investigating various instruments of corporate venturing as part of his doctorate. He has been working at the Institute for Entrepreneurship & Innovation (IEI) for almost three years.

From a scientific point of view: Where can venture clienting be placed theoretically - more in the context of corporate entrepreneurship, open innovation or as an independent concept?

From a scientific perspective, venture clienting can be placed in the context of corporate entrepreneurship and understood more specifically as a dedicated corporate venturing instrument. Corporate entrepreneurship encompasses initiatives within established organizations that aim to develop new business models and drive innovation, change and renewal (Urbano et al., 2022).

There is considerable terminological inconsistency in the context of corporate entrepreneurship. Different terms such as corporate venturing, intrapreneurship, strategic entrepreneurship or strategic renewal are sometimes used synonymously in the literature to describe similar or overlapping phenomena. This conceptual blurring makes it difficult to draw a consistent conceptual distinction and means that comparability and cumulative findings across studies are only possible to a limited extent.

Within this framework, venture clienting can be classified as external corporate venturing, which - in contrast to internal corporate venturing - includes activities such as working with start-ups to develop new business opportunities outside the company's boundaries (Burgelman, 1983; Benson & Ziedonis, 2009; Narayanan et al, 2009; Covin & Miles, 2007; Urbano et al, 2022). By established organizations acting as early customers of start-ups in order to adapt their innovations without developing them themselves or financing them in the traditional way (in return for company shares), venture clienting represents a concrete mechanism of innovation adoption (Gimmy et al., 2017; Gutmann et al., 2024; Baumgärtner et al., 2024; Chesbrough, 2015).

Conceptually, there is also often an overlap with the term "open innovation", as venture clienting is aimed at targeted external collaboration and the use of resources. However, open innovation is to be understood as an overarching innovation or management paradigm, while venture clienting is a specific operational instrument within this paradigm. Venture clienting should therefore be viewed less as an independent theoretical concept and more as a concrete tool of corporate entrepreneurship in the context of external corporate venturing.

The literature to date is still comparatively young. Which theoretical approaches are particularly suitable for systematically analyzing venture clienting?

There is indeed very little high-quality academic literature with a special focus on venture clienting, whereas more and more white papers and semi-academic articles are shedding light on the phenomenon from different perspectives. The existing academic literature conceptualizes venture clienting in particular as an organizational capability model for the systematic integration of external innovations (Baumgärtner et al., 2024; Kurpjuweit et al., 2021; Rückwald et al., 2025) and as a mechanism of innovation adoption in the context of corporate venturing and open innovation.

A number of theoretically sound strands of literature lend themselves to a systematic and scientifically sound examination of venture clienting:

Dynamic Capabilities

The dynamic capabilities perspective focuses on the ability of organizations to integrate, build and reconfigure internal and external competencies in order to respond to dynamic environmental changes. Venture clienting can be analyzed from this perspective, as it enables companies to systematically identify and integrate external technological developments and harness them for strategic adaptation processes.

Resource orchestration

The resource orchestration approach examines how organizations structure, bundle and deploy resources in a targeted manner in order to generate competitive advantages. Venture clienting offers an analytical lens here, as companies do not own external startup resources, but orchestrate them through coordinated integration and integrate them into existing resource structures.

Absorptive capacity

The theory of absorptive capacity describes the ability of organizations to recognize, absorb and commercially exploit external knowledge. Venture clienting represents a structured mechanism through which precisely this knowledge absorption and integration can take place, making it possible to examine how companies develop their absorption and utilization capacities for external innovations.

Diffusion of innovations

The diffusion perspective analyses how innovations spread and are implemented within and between organizations. Venture clienting can be seen here as an organizational adoption channel through which new technologies enter existing structures at an early stage and their diffusion and implementation dynamics can be examined.

You speak of venture clienting as an organizational capability. What specific capabilities do companies need to develop in order to make this approach repeatable and scalable?

In order for venture clienting to be implemented in a repeatable and scalable way, organizations need to build and continuously develop interlinked capabilities. It is important that all stakeholders involved are included in the venture clienting process from the outset and pull together. The specific relevant capabilities include

• Identification of clearly defined pain points from the business areas
• Evaluation and matching of suitable start-up solutions under high uncertainty

• Ensuring technical integration into existing IT structures as well as coordinated internal processes tailored to start-ups within and between all relevant departments such as purchasing, controlling and the business units
• Top management support and provision of pilot budgets
• Continuous internal change and communication management
• Ability to translate between start-up and corporate logics
• Coordination of top-down strategic legitimization and bottom-up implementation

Among other things, these organizational skills make it possible to systematically implement pilot projects, promote organizational learning and ultimately scale venture clienting sustainably.

What methodological challenges do you face in research when you want to empirically measure the impact of venture clienting?

Empirical research into the long-term impact of venture clienting in particular is associated with several methodological challenges:

• limited data availability due to the young research landscape
• strong dependence on practice-driven case studies
• difficulties in the causal attribution of innovation effects without clearly reliable, transparently accessible company key figures
• lack of standardized KPIs for evaluating efficiency or value creation across company contexts
• limited possibilities for recording long-term strategic effects

These limitations have so far made comparative analyses and cumulative knowledge building difficult.

Which key factors for the successful implementation of venture clienting can be identified so far on the basis of your empirical analyses?

Initial results from the evaluation of the interviews conducted and the analysis of supplementary secondary materials indicate that internal communication and stakeholder alignment are key factors for the successful implementation of venture clienting. In particular, the early involvement of relevant organizational stakeholders, the synchronization of expectations and the continuous internal communication of the objectives and benefits of the approach contribute significantly to acceptance and operational feasibility.

These findings underline the fact that venture clienting cannot be understood exclusively as a procedural or technological instrument, but also as an organizational change and coordination phenomenon. However, a more in-depth theoretical embedding of these dynamics in organizational theory models would require a separate analytical focus and is outside the primary focus of this article. Rather, the results presented here point to a relevant field of connection for future research.

What role do intermediaries play from a scientific perspective - can they be described as a separate category of actors in innovation ecosystems?

In this article, intermediaries are understood to be all external actors that are neither the established companies nor the start-ups themselves, but act as intermediaries between the two - these include, for example, consulting agencies, service providers or digital platforms that support the processes, networks and implementation of venture clienting.

Intermediaries play a central role in process design, implementation, training and network access. Despite their growing practical importance, it is still unclear scientifically what specific mechanisms and effects they have.

This gives rise to the perspective of considering intermediaries as an independent category of actors within innovation ecosystems, whose functions, however, require further systematic investigation.

In particular, intermediaries - such as external consulting agencies, specialized service providers or digital platforms - gain their own significance, as they not only support the implementation and dissemination of venture clienting, but also have their own economic interest in the success of this instrument; social and other digital media also contribute significantly to the dissemination and legitimation of venture clienting. From a scientific perspective, it is therefore particularly relevant to analyse which influencing factors control intermediaries, which mechanisms result from this and how they shape the adoption and effectiveness of venture clienting within organizations.

What key open research questions can be derived from an academic perspective on the topic of venture clienting?

Long-term strategic effects: How does venture clienting change the innovative capacity of organizations over years?

Internal competence developmentWhat specific stakeholder and role profiles and skills are needed internally in order to mediate efficiently between start-up and corporate language, identify suitable pain points within the company and develop long-term scaling projects from initial pilot projects?

Measurement of success factorsQuantitative and qualitative indicators are still lacking. Which KPIs can be used to track effectiveness (cost savings vs. increased efficiency vs. new profit) in a meaningful way?

Better understanding of the role of intermediariesWhich actors influence the dissemination and implementation of venture clienting? How do they shape perception, adaptation and implementation in different business contexts?

Based on your research, what recommendations would you make for anchoring venture clienting as a structured and effective innovation approach in companies in the long term and why is high-quality scientific research central to this?

Venture clienting is increasingly recognized as a strategic innovation approach, and more and more companies of different industries and sizes are setting up their own venture client units. There is a growing need for empirical research and best practice analysis to generate sound insights on implementation, process design and organizational effects.

In view of the increasing prevalence of venture clienting, it is necessary to consolidate and further develop theoretical models, empirical data and best practices. This is the only way to anchor venture clienting as a structured, repeatable innovation approach that can have measurable effects on company performance and startup integration.

In order for venture clienting to be used in the long term as an established innovation instrument within the framework of corporate venturing activities, a uniform understanding of processes and systems as well as clearly defined implementation principles are required. Continuous empirical research and academic discourse are crucial in order to develop theoretical models, empirical data and best practices that enable effective implementation across different corporate contexts and create realistic expectations of the instrument.

Startbase would like to thank you for the written interview.