PhD student Dennis Gan from DIGENT participated at the Babson College Entrepreneurship Research Conference (BCERC) in Boston, Massachusetts (United States) this month. BCERC was founded in 1981 by Babson College and is considered by many to be the premier entrepreneurship research conference in the world. Proceedings from the Conference are found at the Frontiers of Entrepreneurship Research compilation.

Gan presented at the BCERC 2019 the paper INCUMBENTS AND STARTUPS: ON COLLISION COURSE, authored by him and Steffen Korsgaard.

The abstract of the paper follows:
Despite the promise of complementary resources between incumbents and startups when they enter into strategic alliances, many alliances often end prematurely. This study explores the occurrences of conflicts between incumbents and startups by drawing upon justice theory. We conducted 26 interviews with executives from incumbents, startups, and incubators on their past five doomed strategic alliances. Our findings show that the procedures for incumbents and startups to collaborate are not in place yet (procedural justice) and there is a lack of transparency behind the incumbents’ motives to engage with the startups (interactional justice). We explore the implications of our findings and propose how incumbents and startups can collaborate better in future alliances.