Open Access

Franz Simon, Vincent Delke, Rainer Harms, Holger Schiele

• External sources of knowledge have become a necessary extension to internal innovation activities (Monteiro, Mol and Birkinshaw, 2017; Rosenkopf and Nerkar, 2001). Collaborations with customers, suppliers, universities or even competitors are a promising way to extend the own knowledge base in order to increase the firm´s innovativeness (Felin and Zenger, 2014; Laursen and Salter, 2006). onsidering this potential set of external partners, suppliers seem to have the largest impact on product innovation (Un, Cuervo-Cazurra and Asakawa, 2010). Yet, suppliers’ innovative potential is limited as described in a case study by Gassmann, Zeschky, Wolff, and Stahl (2010), which further shows how a new venture supplier, commonly referred to as “startup”, has succeed at providing a truly innovative idea (a haptic feedback control device for automobiles). Therefore, startups as a specific knowledge provider have received growing attention (Weiblen and Chesbrough, 2015; Zaremba, Bode and Wagner, 2016). By collaborating with startups, corporations hope to benefit from the startups´ entrepreneurial characteristics, such as alertness, creativity, flexibility and willingness to take risks (Audretsch, Segarra and Teruel, 2014; Criscuolo, Nicolaou and Salter, 2012; Marion, Friar and Simpson, 2012).