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Multinationals are showing a growing interest in developing corporate incubation programs. However, only a few papers analyzed this emerging topic. We conducted a study at a Brazilian multinational steel company subsidiary, aiming to elucidate the process of designing a corporate incubator through a three-phase Action Research program that spanned 12 months. As a result of this study, we offer (i) a sequential and evolutionary framework for implementing corporate incubators; (ii) an information management tool that captures and utilizes data for decision-making during venture development; and (iii) an uncertainty-based evaluation tool for venture evolution.

Established companies are increasingly challenged to expand their innovation development capabilities and to align them to increasingly ambidextrous requirements. A currently popular way for companies to meet these requirements is corporate incubators. Successfully designing such units imposes specific challenges on companies, which results in large numbers of different corporate incubator types spanning a wide range of activities. This group of very different incubation concepts is not only very difficult to manage from a practical perspective, it is also complex to reliably explore from a research perspective. In this study, we therefore examine how incubators can be comprehensively categorised and how different objectives and strategies relate to corporate incubator performance. Results from cluster and regression analysis of a sample of incubators from 14 different industries reveal 16 clusters dependent on five objective and five strategy criteria. The criteria have a diverse relation to performance which can be explained using transactional distance theory.